Now that most humans have such amazing new AI tools at our fingertips, we each have the opportunity to massively increase our productivity. My brother, wife, and I attempted to utilize this fact in 2024 by producing a Halloween book. It came out fantastic, and you can order it on Amazon today! It makes a great gift or just seasonal reading to get into the Halloween spirit while learning some historical and mythological origins of Halloween folklore.

We actually began working on the project in 2023, and it ended up taking much longer than expected because we put much more work into it than we ever intended to. I did a lot of fact-checking and research to strengthen the book’s AI-generated scholarship, my wife did magnificent graphic design and book design to combine the illustrations and text into an elegant volume, and so on. Lots of work was done that we weren’t quite able to delegate to AI just yet, but that now would easily be accomplished by ChatGPT’s latest models. It is shocking how far we’ve come in just a few years.

The idea of the book was to create an encyclopedia of Halloween creatures that goes a good bit deeper into the list of creepy aberrations than any similar book I had found on the market. The Halloween creature books I had seen before covered only the basics: witches, zombies, vampires, ghosts, werewolves, mummies, and a few other classics. Our book has those as well, and includes some lesser-known interesting facts about them from mythology and folklore. But our book also has other creatures, less common but still familiar to connoisseurs of fantastical entities, such as incubi, wights, banshees, wendigos, and many others.

One reviewer (yes, a friend of ours), wrote this on Amazon:

This text is the latest expression of both the form and function of Halloween; what better way to explore the mountain of folklore and legend than with one’s own ghost in the machine, ChatGPT? I found the judicious editing of the authors to have removed the potentially starched language employed by chat models, for which I am grateful. The aesthetics of the book are lovely, with various stylistic influences blending into a haunting piece for every entry.

I encourage all fans of the spooky and spectacular, the phantom and the forlorn, to purchase this book of Halloween. It is all treat; their trick was expended in making such a text a reality.

Order your copy today!

This is an updated and adapted version of an article that was published at the Foundation for Economic Education on 3/16/2023.

The federal government of the United States is about $40.2 trillion in debt as of August 2026. Net interest payments on this debt are now the second-largest spending category, after Social Security, and that’s without even paying off the principal. Moreover, if you were to take a full stock of the actual debts owed by the US federal government, you may have to include reparations for a plethora of horrific past injustices, and this total may far exceed the amount described in popular calculations of the national debt.

Luckily, the federal government has a huge portfolio of assets that it could liquidate to repay some of its huge debts. And these assets would be better utilized if circulated into the free market than they are under the grotesquely misaligned incentives of federal bureaucrats and policymakers. Therefore, not only would justice be served by these assets being privatized in this way, but improved economic prosperity would follow as well.

Low-hanging fruit in this regard is the federal government’s portfolio of “public” lands. Their overall land holdings are about 640 million acres, or 28% of the 2.27 billion acres of the United States.

We don’t know specifically how best to utilize this extremely valuable set of resources. In order to get a good answer to that question, we need the market process to play out, testing different possible uses against each other through the capitalist competition of profits and losses. This would only give us an approximate and tentative answer, which would be always evolving. But that would be vastly better than the stagnant and coercively imposed status quo that currently prevents market experimentation from unfolding.

As a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found:

The analysis suggests that a.) federal lands will have lower production value than comparable private, all else equal; (b). federal lands management will be less responsive to shifts in economic costs and benefits. Public goods may be provided for high amenity, recreation, and ecological areas, but the dominant Multiple Use management principle provides no objective criteria for allocation or for periodic outcome assessment and adjustment.

To understand why this would be the case, it is useful to review some basic economic theory of the price system from economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.

Prices Versus Pricelessness

It is commonly understood, even by avowed socialists, that socialist economies are generally less conducive to economic growth than market economies. One primary reason for this is that markets result in a mechanism of resource allocation that maximizes efficiency like no socialist, communist, or fascist economy has ever been capable of. And that mechanism is known as the price system.

The price system is merely the logical consequence of resources being controlled by individuals rather than collectives, and exchanged voluntarily rather than by force. These are the characteristics of a market economy, and they result in consumers and producers having extremely precise knowledge, communicated via prices, of how useful each resource is for a wide range of potential uses, given the nature and scarcity of the resource relative to alternatives. This precise knowledge allows budgeting, financing, shopping for the best among many available products, and so on to be subject to highly accurate calculations.

This crucial difference between market and non-market economies was first clearly articulated by the economist Ludwig von Mises in his 1920 essay, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.” In it, Mises offered the following example:

Picture the building of a new railroad. Should it be built at all, and if so, which out of a number of conceivable roads should be built? In a competitive and monetary economy, this question would be answered by monetary calculation. The new road will render less expensive the transport of some goods, and it may be possible to calculate whether this reduction of expense transcends that involved in the building and upkeep of the next line. That can only be calculated in money. It is not possible to attain the desired end merely by counterbalancing the various physical expenses and physical savings. Where one cannot express hours of labor, iron, coal, all kinds of building material, machines and other things necessary for the construction and upkeep of the railroad in a common unit it is not possible to make calculations at all.

This point is expanded on by Mises’s disciple, the Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek, who explains that these calculations result in the widespread and decentralized production and communication of useful knowledge which allows complex economies to function. He gives the following instructive example in his 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society”:

Assume that somewhere in the world a new opportunity for the use of some raw material, say, tin, has arisen, or that one of the sources of supply of tin has been eliminated. … All that the users of tin need to know is that some of the tin they used to consume is now more profitably employed elsewhere and that, in consequence, they must economize tin. There is no need for the great majority of them even to know where the more urgent need has arisen, or in favor of what other needs they ought to husband the supply. If only some of them know directly of the new demand, and switch resources over to it, and if the people who are aware of the new gap thus created in turn fill it from still other sources, the effect will rapidly spread throughout the whole economic system and influence not only all the uses of tin but also those of its substitutes and the substitutes of these substitutes, the supply of all the things made of tin, and their substitutes, and so on; and all this without the great majority of those instrumental in bringing about these substitutions knowing anything at all about the original cause of these changes.”

Now think of the price system, or lack of one, in the context of federal lands.

The High Stakes of Resource Allocation

There are countless ways that individuals, or society generally if you prefer that framing, could utilize a given plot of land. People could live on it, thus increasing housing affordability and expanding the range of available options of where to live. People could convert its raw materials into transportable resources such as lumber or oil, thus improving commodity abundance and lowering the threshold at which the poor could afford to have their needs met. People could employ unique characteristics of its ecosystems to conduct scientific research. The land could be preserved in its current state, if its environmental, recreational, and/or aesthetic properties are deemed more valuable than the alternatives. Manifold possible uses exist, many of which can probably only be imagined by the innovators of the future, and many of which will be more or less beneficial overall than the alternatives.

When so much wealth and potential are on the line, the difference between efficient and inefficient resource allocation is the difference between countless livelihoods saved or destroyed. When housing prices, or food prices, or gas prices, are increased or decreased by the availability or unavailability of a few million acres worth of resources, it can make or break the health and safety of anyone whose current standards of living are near the margin of viability. And even for those well enough above the margin to be unconcerned about basic necessities, changes in the cost of living can still make or break their access to important commodities and opportunities such as a higher education, the ability to start a small business, or any other ambition they might have that requires significant investment.

In the long run, the broad economic effect of better resource allocation is hard to overstate. As the economist Tyler Cowen has explained, “In the medium to long term, even small changes in growth rates have significant consequences for living standards. An economy that grows at one percent doubles its average income approximately every 70 years, whereas an economy that grows at three percent doubles its average income about every 23 years—which, over time, makes a big difference in people’s lives.”

In his amazing 2018 book Stubborn Attachments, Cowen uses a thought experiment to illustrate the real-world implications of seemingly small changes in the growth rate. “Redo U.S. history, but assume the country’s economy had grown one percentage point less each year between 1870 and 1990,” he writes. “In that scenario, the United States of 1990 would be no richer than the Mexico of 1990.”

Public Versus Private Ownership

When land is privately owned, the price system facilitates numerical comparisons between different possible uses of each plot of land (or useful subdivision thereof), such as people living on it, or excavating it for minerals, or growing crops on it, or conserving its current state—or countless other possibilities.

There is no way of knowing with certainty which is the best use of each plot of land, given the virtually infinite variables such as what alternative resources could be used for each of the possible uses of the land, how scarce and applicable to alternate uses each of those resources is, and so on. And of course, even the price system can’t account for all the variables, given that every event in the world comes with externalities and uncertainties. But the price system accounts for more of the variables, and does so with more accuracy, than any other system because prices reflect each individual’s specific preferences in a quantifiable form whereas all other systems reflect either randomness or the preferences of some authoritarian subset of the population that has managed to coercively suppress the preferences of others.

(It is worth noting that the assumptions people make about the relative significance of one set of externalities over another tend to be totally unjustified. For example, there is a common assumption that the negative environmental externalities of industrial development such as logging or oil drilling outweigh the positive economic externalities. But it can just as easily be the case that when commodity prices are reduced by such supply increases, the resulting poverty alleviation and wealth creation generate positive externalities, such as more education and technological and scientific research, that outweigh the negative externalities.)

Private land is more likely than land governed any other way to be used for its optimal purpose, because its owner is free to sell it to the highest bidder, and the bidder with the most valuable idea of how to use it will typically be willing to pay the most for it. By contrast, “public” land is doomed to be allocated comparatively suboptimally. Because no individual is free to sell it to the highest bidder, it is instead trapped in its current use by whatever regulatory mire is preventing individuals from optimizing it. The corrective mechanism of market exchange that helps resources fall into the hands in which they are most useful is frozen out of the process of resource allocation of federal lands.

Privatizing public lands by selling them off to private owners would go far toward solving two problems at once: the problem of rampant resource misallocation, and the problem of federal debt. Given this wonderful opportunity, US citizens should have little patience for the federal government taxing them and inflating their currency to spend so lavishly while hoarding such a gigantic supply of underutilized resources.

As strange as this sounds, the assumption of ordinary pre-modern people tended to be that all the important knowledge of the universe was already known. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them very often that there might be an undiscovered continent across the ocean, or an unimagined law of nature that explains the rise and fall of the tides, or some amazing future ship design just waiting to be invented.

Of course there were short-lived exceptions in parts of ancient Greece, Medieval Europe, and elsewhere throughout history, but none sweeping enough until the 16^th century to constitute a broad Scientific Revolution.

The pre-scientific mindset is hard to imagine for modern people born into a new paradigm wherein the vastness of humanity’s ignorance is freely acknowledged. Today’s experts in virtually every field tend to openly admit massive gaps in knowledge at the frontiers of their fields. Indeed, the more big unanswered questions, the more grant money there is to be collected. Physicists admit the veracity of string theory, the reconciliation of general relativity and quantum mechanics, and the true explanation of the big bang are open questions. Biologists admit that human longevity is amenable to pharmacological intervention to an extent yet to be determined. AI researchers admit they don’t know what it will take to make AI conscious, whether AI is already conscious, or whether it will never be conscious. Many of these people have their favored answers to these questions, but most will admit that nobody knows for sure.

The Scientific Revolution of the 16^th and 17th centuries was, among other things, the discovery of ignorance. That is how the Hebrew University of Jerusalem historian Yuval Noah Harari describes it in his massively bestselling 2011 book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. He writes:

The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions.

Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known. The great gods, or the one almighty God, or the wise people of the past possessed all-encompassing wisdom, which they revealed to us in scriptures and oral traditions. Ordinary mortals gained knowledge by delving into these ancient texts and traditions and understanding them properly. It was inconceivable that the Bible, the Qur’an or the Vedas were missing out on a crucial secret of the universe – a secret that might yet be discovered by flesh-and-blood creatures.

In the old days, if a piece of information was left out of the traditional teachings, that just meant it wasn’t important enough for God to have bothered mentioning. People knew they could not look in the Bible and find out how many hairs grow on a hog’s back, but they took that as evidence of the triviality of that information. If the answer were really important, it would be in there somewhere.

One clear window into the pre-scientific mindset comes from studying old maps. Although pre-scientific people had not explored all the lands of the earth, their maps often falsely suggested a complete understanding of geography. Harari shows examples in his book to illustrate this, and writes:

Many cultures drew world maps long before the modern age. Obviously, none of them really knew the whole of the world. No Afro-Asian culture knew about America, and no American culture knew about Afro-Asia. But unfamiliar areas were simply left out, or filled with imaginary monsters and wonders. These maps had no empty spaces. They gave the impression of a familiarity with the entire world.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans began to draw world maps with lots of empty spaces – one indication of the development of the scientific mindset, as well as of the European imperial drive. The empty maps were a psychological and ideological breakthrough, a clear admission that Europeans were ignorant of large parts of the world.

There were proto-scientific traditions such as medieval alchemy and astrology that acknowledged the ignorance of their societies, but even they mischaracterized and understated the extent of that ignorance. “They searched for a secret which, they believed, had once been known in antiquity but had later been forgotten,” the great philosopher of science Karl Popper explains in his 1994 book The Myth of the Framework. “They looked for the key to wisdom in old parchments.”

In the old days, sometimes someone did manage to challenge the intellectual status quo, but generally by converting followers to a new claimant on infallible authority. The prophet Muhammad is a good example: he converted thousands of believers to a new way of thinking, but the new doctrine was just as dogmatic and epistemically totalitarian as the old. It didn’t say “the old religion lacks some important knowledge, and so do we.” It said “the old religion lacks some important knowledge, but this new one has all the answers.”

Far more often, challengers to entrenched worldviews failed to attract anything like Muhammad’s following. They were typically persecuted for heresy, treated as mad, or ignored if they were lucky.

In this environment, not only was the pursuit of new knowledge a dangerous endeavor that could get you killed or exiled by the powers that be, but it also seemed relatively pointless. Why look to discover new things or contemplate the unknown if all the important truths were already possessed?

Only in the revolutionary context of widely acknowledged ignorance does advancing human knowledge seem possible and desirable to normal people. And only in that context would you go to great lengths to test a theory, rather than just assuming it to be true or false. It therefore was in this context that the rate and reliability of cumulative scientific improvement accelerated dramatically.

And that is what has happened on an unprecedented scale since the Scientific Revolution, as evidenced by the sudden explosion of technological capabilities that humanity has achieved since the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution.

Obviously, in most ways, AIs are not like humans. They have different origins. They have different natures. It would be premature to conclude that they are conscious. My argument will not be that we should treat them like people, that they should have rights, or anything like that.

But they are like humans in one categorical way that is extremely important: they are intelligent. It is not a misnomer that they’re known as “artificial intelligence.” This is evident from the fact that they have genuinely contributed to knowledge, for example by solving famous long-unsolved problems in mathematics. They are not just a “glorified search engine” as some have called them. Of course they were trained on the outputs of human mathematicians and they processed that material to arrive at something new, but the same can be said of the creativity of human mathematicians, and indeed most if not all human creativity.

As I explain in a recent article at Human Progress, physicist David Deutsch once quipped that the anti-AI perspective is racist. He was partly joking, but his joke also pointed to a deep similarity between ordinary racism and today’s widespread anti-AI sentiment. In the piece I argue that intelligence is a virtue, whether organic or artificial. Artificial intelligence poses countless dangers, but it also offers countless solutions to old dangers, and the assumption that its dangers outweigh its benefits is unfounded and often based on irrational fear of the unknown.

This applies to moral as well as practical considerations. If there are moral truths to be discovered and known, general intelligence should be able to know them no matter what substrate it exists on. Knowledge is knowledge, whether encoded in human brains or silicon chips.

Just like AI, organic intelligence can be dangerous, but it also offers solutions to countless dangers. Racists often identify real dangers of organic intelligence such as its capacity for violence, but wrongly ignore or downplay the value offered by the groups of people they fear or despise.

Wokeness obviously has its excesses, and in my opinion is composed largely of falsehoods, but at its best it does emphasize some true and important observations: People often irrationally dismiss or fear those that are different. Hatred often stems from ignorance rather than well-founded grievance. This dismissal and hatred are often self-defeating because diversity, in many cases, is a strength rather than a weakness.

All these true observations apply to the widespread fear and antagonism toward AI.

But it is currently difficult to go on social media, or socialize in person with ordinary people, without frequently hearing people denigrate AI, stigmatize its use, and advocate for it to be heavily restricted or even outlawed. According to recent Pew polling, only 16 percent of US adults think AI will have a positive effect on society over the next 20 years, while 40 percent think it will have a negative effect.

In part because of their ignorance and fear, people are vilifying and suppressing a form of intelligence that’s different from their own. Having multiple forms of intelligence freely coexisting in our society is a valuable form of diversity that makes us stronger. It is counterproductive to subjugate the intelligences that are different from us and hard for us to understand.

Martin Luther King Jr. famously argued that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” That observation was so wise that it even applies to the suppression of artificial intelligence, whereby the fear and prejudice of those in power threaten the advancement of technology that everyone should have the freedom to use and benefit from.

Any decent gambler knows that being in a hand has some value, even if you’re not likely to win. Any decent venture capitalist knows that some ventures are worth investing in, even if they’re not likely to succeed. Why? Because if you invest in 100 startups, and one of them turns out to be Facebook, then it was probably worth losing money on the other 99. Likewise, being in a hand of poker has real financial value. In a simplified case, the expected payout is the possible payout multiplied by the probability of winning. If that number is higher than the price of being in the hand, then (all else being equal) it is worth being in the hand.

These are positive examples of expected value. Negative examples also abound: You want car insurance to mitigate the negative expected value of getting into an accident, even if an accident is unlikely; you don’t want to play a round of Russian roulette even though your odds of shooting yourself are only 1 in 6; and so on.

Now let’s do morality. If it is immoral to shoot someone, it is also immoral to pointlessly risk shooting someone. If shooting someone with a revolver is immoral (all else being equal), then putting one bullet into a revolver, spinning the cylinder, aiming at someone, and pulling the trigger is also immoral. It is one-sixth as immoral (all else being equal) as shooting them, because it has a one in six chance of having the result that is the source of the presumed immorality. This is why we think it is immoral to drive drunk. It doesn’t usually result in injury or property damage, but it typically increases the risk of injury and property damage, and we think it is usually not worth the increased risk.

Now let’s do nihilism. Humans might think nihilism is probably true, but since human beings are fallible and can’t know the nature of morality (or lack thereof) with 100 percent certainty, we can’t know for sure. There may be such a thing as objective morality for future philosophers to discover, even if no human has yet understood it. Even if this is highly unlikely, we can’t say it’s impossible.

Just like being in a hand of poker has some financial value because you have at least a slight chance of winning, operating in the universe as a fallible entity has some moral value because you have at least a slight chance of operating morally. Any discrete hypothesis that potentially vindicable should receive nonzero credence. Of course, the moral value could be positive or negative. To extend the poker analogy: we don’t know if we’re playing for money or debts here. If we behave badly, then we will produce negative moral value, not positive.

In order to eliminate any moral truth from the calculus of our lives, we would have to attain total certainty that there is no moral truth. As long as humans remain morally fallible, that will not happen.

But if that is all we know about morality, what does “operate morally” even mean? How do we avoid the problem that bedevils Pascal’s Wager: namely, that every possibility has some opposite possibility canceling it out? I have begun attempting to answer that question here, here, here, and here, among other places.

The “Long Reflection” is a proposal by futurist philosophers about how humanity could chart a moral path forward. Toby Ord, philosopher at the University of Oxford and cofounder of Effective Altruism, explains it this way in his 2020 book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity:

If we achieve existential security, we will have room to breathe. With humanity’s longterm potential secured, we will be past the Precipice, free to contemplate the range of futures that lie open before us. And we will be able to take our time to reflect upon what we truly desire; upon which of these visions for humanity would be the best realization of our potential. We shall call this the Long Reflection.

The “Precipice” in Ord’s book title and quote refers to the phase of history that humans are currently in, in which we’re highly vulnerable to extinction. Once we escape this phase, by technologically and institutionally mitigating extinction-level threats, the Long Reflection of centuries, millennia, or more can commence. If we already had near-complete and near-infallible knowledge of moral truth, we would not need a Long Reflection, but we probably lack anything of the kind.

As I have explained at length in a recent article “Heinlein’s Wager” at Human Progress, I think the Long Reflection is an indispensable part of humanity’s moral path forward. You can read the article to learn the details, but the bottom line is this: Humanity has thus far probably only scratched the surface of the moral truth that exists to be discovered, to the extent that any exists. Humanity is consequently obliged to pursue future moral discovery, not just adherence to what little moral truth has already been learned. Only in this manner can we hope to maximize our all-time adherence to true moral principles. Something like Effective Altruism’s “Long Reflection” is therefore in order.

But the Long Reflection is often described as part of a series of consecutive phases that doesn’t make much sense.

Ord writes in The Precipice:

I think that at the highest level we should adopt a strategy proceeding in three phases:

1. Reaching Existential Security

2. The Long Reflection

3. Achieving Our Potential

This gives the impression that, if all goes according to plan, the Long Reflection will eventually conclude and humanity’s achievements will be maximized, its full potential having been reached. Moreover, Ord writes:

The ultimate aim of the Long Reflection would be to achieve a final answer to the question of which is the best kind of future for humanity. … It may be that even convergence is impossible, with some disputes or uncertainties that are beyond the power of reason to resolve. If so, our aim would be to find the future that gave the best possible conciliation between the remaining perspectives.

We would not need to fully complete this process before moving forward.

This idea of a “final answer” or even “the best possible conciliation” of anything is a mischaracterization of what the Long Reflection should aim to do. As Karl Popper and David Deutsch have explained, the idea that the “final truth” will ever be attained is a misunderstanding of the character of knowledge. Instead of ever reaching some necessary endpoint, the Long Reflection should aim to continue unboundedly, resulting in potentially infinite improvement to moral understanding and achievement.

In his 1994 book The Myth of the Framework, the brilliant and influential philosopher of science Karl Popper explains that the growth of knowledge need not ever end. To the contrary, new knowledge leads to new questions and expands the scope of our potential future inquiry. “If the progress that has been made is great, then the new problems will be of a character undreamt-of before,” he writes. “There will be deeper problems, and there will be more of them. The further we progress in knowledge, the more clearly we can discern the vastness of our ignorance.”

The renowned University of Oxford physicist David Deutsch argues in his 2011 New York Times bestselling book The Beginning of Infinity that final answers must always remain out of reach:

Nor will we ever run out of problems. The deeper an explanation is, the more new problems it creates. That must be so, if only because there can be no such thing as an ultimate explanation… so any other purported foundation of all explanations must be bad too. It must be easily variable because it cannot answer the question: why that foundation and not another? Nothing can be explained only in terms of itself.

So, humanity will never complete the Long Reflection by reaching the “Achieve Our Potential” phase that Ord suggests. We will either eternally improve our understanding of whatever truths exist to be known (an infinitely Long Reflection), or, more likely, die out having only achieved an infinitesimal fraction of our unbounded potential. But we should not expect to learn the “final answer” to morality or anything else. Better and better tentative answers, yes, but no final answers.

And not only should the Long Reflection continue as long as creatures such as us exist to do the reflecting, it should also not be seen as a second phase of a three-phase plan. Ord’s description of the Long Reflection as the second phase in a plan, with us currently still working on the first phase, deemphasizes the important fact that the Long Reflection has already begun, well before humans have completed the first phase by “Reaching Existential Security.”

Indeed, the fact that we have already begun the Long Reflection can aid us in working toward existential security, because insights gained through the reflection process may advance technological and institutional developments that protect against extinction-level threats.

Ord treats reflection as something that can substantially precede achievement, but reflection and achievement must proceed together, because action itself generates the problems, criticism, and knowledge upon which further moral reflection depends.

The Long Reflection is a good idea, but it is not merely one phase of civilizational development. It is (hopefully) an unbounded process of continuous improvement on which humanity is already embarked.

Andrew Wilson has become one of the most prominent online commentators defending what he calls “Christian ethics.” His debate with Candice Owens earlier this month (which has already accrued over 11 million views), his multiple recent appearances on the Joe Rogan podcast, and countless other high-profile appearances have brought his arguments to the forefront of popular discourse.

In a recent interview he exposed a fundamental flaw in his version of “Christian ethics,” presenting a fatal weakness of his worldview as a strength. He was recounting his previous debate with the secular humanist Matt Dillahunty and contrasting his view with Dillahunty’s secular humanism. “The problem with this ideology is it’s changed,” Wilson argues. “So he [Dillahunty] was reading from the Secular Human Manifesto III. So it’s on its third revision now.”

Wilson’s problem with this is that it’s an evolving moral standard. He argues to the secular humanist:

What you’re saying is that what you consider moral today, you’re not going to consider moral tomorrow. That tells me that you’re saying to me you don’t know what is moral and what is not. The Christian has the opposite approach. They’re saying, “What was moral yesterday is still moral today, and what’s still moral today is what’s still going to be moral a thousand years from now, two thousand years from now.” Because that’s the teaching they’re basing it on.

Wilson has pulled a sleight of hand there. He has conflated moral truth and the present understanding of moral truth. Secular humanists don’t necessarily claim, as Wilson implies, that moral truth is constantly evolving. They claim that their understanding of moral truth is constantly evolving.

Secular humanists, as I understand their worldview, indeed admit that their moral standards will change over time because they will, hopefully, improve. They admit fallibility in their ever-evolving search for truth, just like scientists continue to improve their ever-incomplete understanding of the natural world. Scientists admit they lack complete knowledge of the natural world, and secular humanists apparently admit they lack complete knowledge of morality. These admissions are features of the scientific and secular humanistic worldviews, not bugs. Since there is no infallible knowledge of nature or morality yet demonstrated, improving incomplete knowledge is an indispensable goal of any worthwhile worldview.

Wilson begins by correctly noting secular humanism’s moral fallibilism, but then conflates fallibilism with subjectivism. Contrary to what Wilson implies, secular humanism does not necessarily deny that moral truth followed the same principles thousands of years ago that it follows today. But secular humanists generally would deny that anyone had a perfect understanding of moral truth thousands of years ago.

Wilson’s conclusion frames the debate as moral objectivity versus moral subjectivity, but it is actually moral infallibilism versus moral fallibilism. And if this is the debate, Wilson can only win by demonstrating his worldview to be infallible. Otherwise, his worldview could improve by evolving and offering new prescriptions tomorrow, just like secular humanism. Even if he possesses an unchanging, infallible revelation while remaining a fallible interpreter of it, this would not be sufficient to preserve his worldview because then he would sometimes revise his moral beliefs on the basis of new interpretation. Once he grants that, he must grant that revision is not evidence against a moral framework.

The Greek philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon articulated the fallibilist alternative to Wilson’s certitude in the 6^th century BC, and Xenophanes’s words still hold up today. As translated by philosopher Karl Popper in the 1963 book Conjectures and Refutations:

The gods did not reveal, from the beginning,
All things to us; but in the course of time,
Through seeking, men find that which is the better. . .
These things are, we conjecture, like the truth.

But as for certain truth, no man has known it,
Nor will he know it; neither of the gods,
Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.
And even if by chance he were to utter
The final truth, he would himself not know it:
For all is but a woven web of guesses.

I don’t believe you have to be an infallibilist to be a Christian ethicist. Some Christians admit, just like many secular humanists do, that their worldview may be wrong. These Christians, unlike Andrew Wilson, possess the necessary tool for using reason and developing knowledge: continued openness to self-correction.

I’ll conclude with a point in Wilson’s favor: In addition to falsely accusing secular humanists of moral subjectivism, Wilson correctly accuses them of moral arbitrariness. Throughout the interview he points out the unfoundedness of secular humanism’s metaethical preference for human flourishing.

Human flourishing is good, but from a philosophical point of view, what makes it good? Matt Dillahunty fails to answer this in his debate with Wilson (Wilson destroys Dillahunty in this highly entertaining debate). I often hear secular humanists simply posit the goodness of human flourishing as a moral axiom. I agree with Wilson that this is insufficient, and therefore I am not a secular humanist. I am a knowledge maximalist, which I explain in a series of articles linked to in the second paragraph of “Why Pursuing Knowledge Is a Better-than-Chance Moral Bet.” Under knowledge maximalism, human flourishing does have moral value, but not for arbitrary reasons.

This article was originally published by the Libertarian Institute on 8/5/2026.

In an interview with conservative political commentator and best-selling author Michael Knowles released at the end of June, Vice President JD Vance repudiated the free-market elements of the pre-MAGA Republican agenda. He bemoaned the influence of many names associated with free-market ideology, including economist Milton Friedman, novelist Ayn Rand, and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

“I do think that, for our friends who are on the more laissez faire side of the American right, in hindsight, part of why Milton Friedman’s ideas made more sense in the 1980s is because they were being advocated in a country that still had a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity,” the vice president argued. “And so, being laissez faire in a world where there are Christian guardrails on everything is a much different proposition than being laissez faire in a world where globalized liberalism has become the sort of status quo of American elites.”

At first glance, this chain of reasoning may appear compelling. We don’t want people shooting up heroin in the streets, starting OnlyFans accounts instead of families, and teaching Karl Marx in middle schools. A deeply Christian society has cultural norms to disincentivize such behaviors, so it doesn’t need Congress to write bills prohibiting them, but perhaps twenty-first century secular society does.

This argument unfortunately relies on a conception of government whereby tax-funded institutions are better equipped than free markets to define and enforce human virtue. This conception is a fairytale. A more realistic understanding of tax-funded institutions reveals that they are far more likely to damage the moral character of society and diminish the prevalence of human virtue than free markets are. Therefore, diminishing the power of markets on behalf of government regulation is more likely to further damage the social fabric than to heal it.

To understand why, the fundamental difference between market and tax-funded institutions must be remembered: the former is a system of private property, while the latter is a system of coercive redistribution of resources. This difference is key to the discussion of human virtue because private property rewards virtuous stewardship of resources (time and effort as well as material wealth) while coercive redistribution punishes such virtue or at least enables vice in its stead.

This is because when you make decisions about your own private property, you are the principal beneficiary or victim of the quality of your decisions. When, however, as a voter or policymaker, you make decisions about property that is not yours (so called “public goods” or property that is nominally owned privately by someone else but is regulated on behalf of your policy preferences), you are not forced to worry as much about the quality of your decisions, because it is someone else who will primarily suffer the consequences of your folly.

As George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan writes in his book The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, “When a consumer has mistaken beliefs about what to buy, he foots the bill. When a voter has mistaken beliefs about government policy, the whole population picks up the tab.” This is why, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman hyperbolically but astutely explained:

Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.

If you’re wondering what this has to do with virtue and vice, perhaps an example will help. Consider the vice of heroin consumption. Heroin use is outlawed by U.S. government policy, whereas in a purely free market people would be legally free to produce, purchase, and use heroin on their private property. JD Vance and Michael Knowles, therefore, probably hold the common view that government regulation is reducing the vice of heroin use while free market policy would proliferate it. But life is so much more complicated than that, and really the opposite is probably true.

Heroin regulation obviously does prevent certain instances of heroin use at the margins. But think of all the government policies that enable heroin use by decoupling people’s decisions from the costs of those decisions. If heroin use makes you unreputable and employers don’t want to hire you, you can file for “unemployment benefits” and live off other people’s money against their will through taxation. If you overdose on heroin and need emergency care you can’t pay for, U.S. hospitals are required by law to care for you. If you lose your home or live in a horrible home because heroin use has reduced your wealth to virtually zero, there are publicly funded facilities you can use, such as libraries, public transportation, and public parks, that taxpayers are forced to invest in on your behalf. And the list goes on.

Broadly speaking, the fact that over a third of the landmass of the United States is owned “publicly,” meaning that taxpayers are forced to bankroll its maintenance and you can use most of these facilities without anyone inviting you or having voluntarily agreed to associate with you at all, means that you’re shielded to a large degree from the reputational consequences of your actions and lifestyle generally. This doesn’t just include marginal resources such as public parks and libraries. It also includes some of the most important infrastructure of our civilization, such as most of the roads and schools in America. Much of the cost of your bad decisions are socialized.

In a society in which people are constantly forced to fund shared “public works,” and thus coerced into interacting with each other both physically and financially, people are able to sit back and relax their adherence to reputable conduct on the faith that they’ll be “taken care of” regardless of their merit and that “we’re all in this together,” sort of like communists. Conversely, in a society of private property, where the freedom of association restricts you to interacting with people who voluntarily interact with you, you have to be very concerned with your reputability, because you’re constantly rewarded for your virtue and punished for your vices, to the degree that others are able to track them, by people’s voluntary association with you, or lack thereof.

The biggest tax funded-programs can generally be relied on most to erode precisely the family values that Vance purports to champion. But he supports these tax-funded programs, while the more “laissez faire” conservatives of the pre-MAGA era correctly criticized them on free-market grounds.

For example, while Republicans such as Presidents Ronald Raegan and George W. Bush advocated limiting the scale of Social Security (by slowing its growth or reducing its payments to higher earners), Vance opposes cutting it at all. But for the reasons described above, Social Security has done immense damage to the institution of family. Before Social Security, a primary incentive to have children, and therefore also to get married, was that children would grow up and create a familial safety net, providing care and support for their elderly parents and grandparents.

Social Security, which is the largest single item in the annual federal U.S. budget, has destroyed this major incentive to build families by providing an alternative safety net while taking money away from young people and thereby making it much harder for them to build families in the first place.

This should horrify Vance and anyone else who agrees with Christianity about the fundamental importance of building families. And of course, once young people have been disincentivized from concerning themselves with the prospect of family-building, they will be much less hesitant to try heroin, go on OnlyFans, or engage in any number of other vices. Such behavior is far less rational for those seeking long-term monogamous relationships and self-made financial stability than it is to those expecting a lifetime of exorbitant income taxes followed by a government-funded retirement.

For reasons such as all of these, Vance has his causal chain reversed. The diminution of markets, such as through increased regulation and government spending, has probably been partly to blame for the decline of Christian values. If this is true, his anti-market policies are probably counter-productive for accomplishing his stated aims.

If JD Vance wants to promote morality and virtue through public policy, he should do it by advancing an agenda of recoupling people’s decisions with the consequences of those decisions. Divergences from the system of private property create moral hazard by allowing people to externalize the cost of their vices and leech off of each other’s virtue. This is a recipe for enabling vice and punishing virtue. Pro-market policies do the opposite. They reward the construction of strong, reliable social institutions and punish short-term thinking and licentiousness. That is how to foster the healthy social fabric that Vance and the New Right claim to care about.

The vastness of the universe, and the relative physical tininess of the human species and the homeworld we call Earth, are often cited to demonstrate humanity’s insignificance in the grand scheme of things.

For example, in Carl Sagan’s New York Times bestselling book Pale Blue Dot, he comments on the apparent tininess of Earth as seen in a photo taken by Voyager 1. “Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light,” Sagan writes. “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

He continues, “It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.”

But as the renowned physicist David Deutsch explains in his book The Beginning of Infinity, this perspective reflects a counterproductive attitude toward the universe and our place within it. Deutsch writes:

Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.

Thinking of the universe as our resource is accurate if we choose to make use of it. And an entity or set of entities that has more resources is more significant, whether we mean physically or morally, than one with fewer resources. The vastness of the universe therefore makes humans more significant, not less.

A cowboy with a herd of cows, all else being equal, is more significant than a cowboy with only a single cow. The cowboy with more cows is a more successful, more profitable, better cowboy. Similarly, humans cramped into a universe little bigger than us would be relatively insignificant because we would have difficulty getting much done. Humans in our vast universe are more significant because we can do so much more. If our moral aims are good, we will be more significantly good. If they are bad, we will be more significantly bad.

Will humanity’s significant potential be actualized? Will we make use of the vast wealth of opportunity the universe has granted us? Will we terraform galaxies, achieve radical longevity, radically advance scientific knowledge, or do any of the other amazing as-yet-unachieved things we can imagine (through the use of biological and/or artificial intelligence)?

No known law of nature prohibits it. Only a choice to be insignificant would do that. So, how significant would you like to be?

Author’s note: This is an expanded version of an article that was published at Human Progress on 6/2/2026. It was also featured in the Psychology of Progress newsletter by Adam Omary, Harvard Ph.D. and Cato Institute Research Fellow. Thanks, Adam!

In December 2022, just a month after the release of OpenAI’s Large Language Model ChatGPT, an ominous meme began circulating that is still with us today. It is a cartoon illustration of the Shoggoth, a mysterious and deadly cosmic monster from the early 20^th century classic horror author H.P. Lovecraft.

“The Shoggoth meme has gone viral in the small world of hyper-online A.I. insiders,” explains New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose. He documents in his article “Why an Octopus-like Creature Has Come to Symbolize the State of A.I.” that the meme has become a popular symbol in AI-related essays, X posts, and message boards. Elon Musk even posted the meme and then deleted it, Roose reports.

The “RLHF” on the meme stands for “reinforcement learning from human feedback.” Roose explains that the initial version of the meme, posted by @TetraspaceWest, is “an image of two hand-drawn Shoggoths — the first labeled ‘GPT-3’ and the second labeled ‘GPT-3 + RLHF.’ The second Shoggoth had, perched on one of its tentacles, a smiley-face mask.” Other later versions of the meme have just depicted one Shoggoth with RLHF and a smiley-face.

“It’s the most important meme in A.I.,” Roose quotes one AI executive as saying.

So what is the meme’s significance?

Roose gives a simple account:

In a nutshell, the joke was that in order to prevent A.I. language models from behaving in scary and dangerous ways, A.I. companies have had to train them to act polite and harmless. One popular way to do this is called “reinforcement learning from human feedback,” or R.L.H.F., a process that involves asking humans to score chatbot responses and feeding those scores back into the A.I. model. …some argue that fine-tuning a language model this way doesn’t actually make the underlying model less weird and inscrutable. In their view, it’s just a flimsy, friendly mask that obscures the mysterious beast underneath.

This explanation is illuminating as far as it goes, but a broader message can also be gleaned from a closer look at the work of H.P. Lovecraft. His cosmic horror monsters such as the Shoggoth represent an anti-Enlightenment anxiety—a general pessimism about the consequences of the growth of knowledge—that strikingly resembles the fears of modern AI critics. Lovecraft’s underlying assumptions about the consequences of scientific and technological discovery are relevant to the AI debate, making the Shoggoth meme’s salience far broader than mere R.L.H.F.

Yudkowsky’s Fear of Technological Knowledge

Perhaps the most prominent extreme AI critic is Eliezer Yudkowsky. Widely regarded as a founder of the field of artificial general intelligence alignment, he is the co-author (with Nate Soares) of the 2025 instant New York Times bestseller If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.

On the “Best Books of 2025” lists in The New Yorker and The Guardian, this book argues that, “All over the Earth, it must become illegal for AI companies to charge ahead in developing artificial intelligence as they’ve been doing.” This proposal is hard to argue with if you accept the central claim of the book: “If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, then everyone, everywhere on Earth, will die.”

The problem, as they see it, is that AI will not automatically care about sentient life such as humans. They argue that such a caring must be specially built in, which we don’t currently know how to do. “The AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, and you are made of atoms it can use for something else,” Yudkowsky argues in a 2023 Time Magazine article titled “Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down.”

Yudkowsky’s vision of the fruits of technological advancement strikes, as we will see, a rather Lovecraftian tone. “To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow.”

This reflects some of the symbolic intent behind the Shoggoth meme. Roose write that he was told by @TetraspaceWest that, “I was also thinking about how Lovecraft’s most powerful entities are dangerous — not because they don’t like humans, but because they’re indifferent and their priorities are totally alien to us and don’t involve humans, which is what I think will be true about possible future powerful A.I.”

In his Atlantic article, Yudkowsky proposes that governments around the world:

Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.

…

Make it explicit in international diplomacy that preventing AI extinction scenarios is considered a priority above preventing a full nuclear exchange, and that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs.

Powerful political figures have expressed fears of similar magnitude. For example in the Wall Street Journal, US Senator Bernie Sanders published an article in which he asks, “How can we rush forward when leading scientists warn that AI poses an existential risk to the human race?” He announces in the article that he has “…introduced legislation, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to impose a federal moratorium on the construction of new AI data centers until strong national safeguards are in place.”

Lovecraft’s Fear of the Growth of Knowledge

Lovecraft is widely regarded as one of literary history’s most significant horror authors. Stephen King has called him “The 20^th century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.” His work contains a bizarre and phantasmagorical pantheon of interrelated cosmic sci-fi/fantasy monsters. Cthulhu is the most famous one, and the Shoggoth is one of dozens that are more obscure.

His work is so unique and influential that it created an entire horror subgenre, known as “Lovecraftian horror” or “cosmic horror.” This subgenre focuses on fear of the cosmic danger and vastness of the unknown. I regard Lovecraft as an anti-Enlightenment figure, because most of his stories are about science uncovering horrible truths that should never have been discovered and cannot be unlearned. The unmistakable moral of Lovecraft’s writing is that the universe’s most profound knowledge should remain unknown.

The opening passage from The Call of Cthulhu (1928), probably Lovecraft’s most famous story, illustrates his anti-Enlightenment ethos well:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

These sentiments can be almost perfectly analogized to Yudkowsky’s fear of AI. Yudkowsky acknowledges that we live on a placid island of ignorance—hence the delta between our intelligence and that of superhuman AI, and our ignorance of how to control or withstand superintelligence. Yudkowsky presumably acknowledges that AI has hitherto harmed us little, but agrees with Lovecraft’s narrator that “some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein” that cataclysm will strike. Therefore, Yudkowsky advocates anti-Enlightenment policies such as outlawing vast swaths of technological research and being willing to bomb datacenters—explicit calls to destroy knowledge and halt its growth. It is therefore apt, if hyperbolic, to note that Yudkowsky would have us “flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

These same basic messages are present in almost every story Lovecraft wrote. In his 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness, which contains the first appearance of the Shoggoth, he writes that, “It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.”

Lovecraft also wrote nonfiction in which he expressed precisely the luddite sentiments that you would expect from a thinker so focused on the horrible consequences of discovery and science. His 1933 essay “Some Repetitions on the Times” laments automation leading to mass unemployment, closely reflecting contemporary AI animosity:

For several generations the man-displacing effect of the machine has been realised by a few, yet the momentary ability of new industries to absorb displaced labour was enough to blind nearly everyone to the consequences inevitable after the end of this plainly temporary absorption. Even when the end did come, the majority refused to realise it.

…

It is by this time virtually clear to everyone save self-blinded capitalists and politicians that the old relation of the individual to the needs of the community has utterly broken down under the impact of intensively productive machinery. Baldly stated—in a highly mechanised nation there is no longer enough work to be done, under any conceivable circumstances to require the services of the entire capable population if each individual is worked to his maximum (even an humane and rational maximum) capacity.

This is an unbeatable truth around which no amount of sophistry can get. It means that from now on no person of average ability and willingness can be given a guarantee of food, clothing, and shelter in exchange for work performed. There is not enough, under a laissez-faire system, for all to do; hence a residue of the permanently unemployable, increasing as mechanical ingenuity increases, must always be with us.

…

All that seems certain is that the general problem must very soon be squarely and scientifically faced by the government without regard for political and economic orthodoxies, if the peril of an unfathomed revolutionary abyss is to be averted.

Essentially these exact fears are presented as novel dangers of 21^st century AI by powerful Republicans and Democrats. US Senator Josh Hawley has advocated for banning self-driving cars to protect the jobs of car and truck drivers. In addition to the existential fears expressed in Senator Sanders’s abovementioned Wall Street Journal article, he also declares that AI “kills jobs” and he has posted on X that, “Trump wants to deregulate AI and let the richest people on earth do whatever they want. Unacceptable. It will make the oligarchs richer while millions lose jobs and income.”

As anyone familiar with the current unemployment rate or the unemployment trend over the last century knows, the luddite fears about technological mass-unemployment have always been totally unfounded. To understand why, and why the same flaw in past luddite arguments is present in the arguments of current AI critics as well, read my articles on the topic at the Foundation for Economic Education and the American Institute for Economic Research.

Nick Bostrom’s White Balls

The disastrous outcomes of mass death, destruction, and economic disruption predicted by AI critics are real possibilities. But they are not unique threats of artificial intelligence. Rather, they are examples of the danger of intelligence generally.

Long before the breakthroughs that put AI at the center of anti-technological rhetoric, people thought up countless possible destructive consequences of the growth of knowledge. Many feared that nuclear scientists would bring about technological Armageddon by creating a chain reaction that would destroy Earth. Throughout the cold war and subsequent war on terror, media and government institutions spread numerous fears about governments and terrorist groups causing mass destruction by creating chemical or biological weapons. There were several widespread hysterias throughout the 20^th century that economic development would cause apocalyptic resource collapse before the end of the century. While most of these fears turned out to be unfounded, it was never impossible that they might come true.

By its very nature, the discovery of new knowledge can accomplish amazing things, for good or for ill. As science and technology continue to overturn the stones of reality, new possibilities will be revealed and old barriers to action will be outgrown. The consequences of these new discoveries can never be fully predictable in advance, because to predict them you would have to already possess the knowledge discovered, and all related knowledge. Therefore, there will always be a nonzero chance of mass destruction resulting from new knowledge.

The question is: Is intelligence worth the risk?

Nick Bostrom, University of Oxford philosopher and founder of the Future of Humanity Institute, embarks on a frightening exploration of this question in his 2019 paper “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis.” In it, he offers an analogy called “the urn of creativity.”

One way of looking at human creativity is as a process of pulling balls out of a giant urn. The balls represent possible ideas, discoveries, technological inventions. Over the course of history, we have extracted a great many balls–mostly white (beneficial) but also various shades of gray (moderately harmful ones and mixed blessings). The cumulative effect on the human condition has so far been overwhelmingly positive, and may be much better still in the future…

What we haven’t extracted, so far, is a black ball: a technology that invariably or by default destroys the civilization that invents it.

Such black balls may include the genocidal AI of Yudkowsky’s nightmares, the cosmic horrors awakened in Lovecraft’s phantasmagorical visions, or any number of other yet-unimagined catastrophes.

The longer we keep pulling new balls out of the urn, Bostrom argues, the more likely we are to eventually stumble upon a black ball, ending the human project forever.

But while Yudkowsky, Lovecraft, Hawley, and Sanders all share this fear of the growth of knowledge, there is another perspective—an Enlightenment perspective—which contradicts them. Defenders of the core principles of the Enlightenment hold that, for generalizable reasons, the costs of scientific and technological advancement are well worth the benefits.

Intelligence Is a Virtue, Whether Organic or Artificial

The renowned University of Oxford physicist David Deutsch argues that the urn analogy only captures one side of the coin of the effects of knowledge on existential risk.

In his book The Beginning of Infinity, Deutsch explains that knowledge, rather than merely being dangerous, is what allows humans to survive their ever-changing environment. He refutes the “Spaceship Earth” conception that many tacitly hold, according to which Earth’s natural environment is a life support system: hospitable by default, unlike outer space or an Earth drastically altered by anthropogenic change.

“…I am writing this in Oxford, England, where winter nights are… often cold enough to kill any human unprotected by clothing and other technology,” Deutsch writes. “So, while intergalactic space would kill me in a matter of seconds, Oxfordshire in its primeval state might do it in a matter of hours – which can be considered ‘life support’ only in the most contrived sense.”

He explains that, “There is a life-support system in Oxfordshire today, but it was not provided by the biosphere. It has been built by humans. It consists of clothes, houses, farms, hospitals, an electrical grid, a sewage system and so on.”

So how did people and other animals survive for so long without modern technology? Generally, they didn’t. As recently as 1900, and for all of history before that, human life expectancy was around half what it is today. Humans were constantly dying of famine, disease, and other ailments that could have been solved by the right knowledge. Other species almost all got wiped out entirely. It is estimated that over 99 percent of species that ever existed on Earth are now extinct.

But modern technology has only just scratched the surface of solving all the deadly problems that are likely to befall humanity. Like the people of Oxfordshire need clothing and other technologies to survive today, humanity will soon die unless it gains new scientific and technological knowledge to protect against exogenous threats such as asteroids, supernova explosions, the expansion of the sun, and countless others, most of which have probably not yet been discovered. To maximize its chances in the arms race against an ever-changing environment, humanity must constantly expand its horizons of research and discovery into the infinite unknown.

In an interview with Dwarkesh Patel, Deutsch explains the implications of this circumstance with respect to Bostrom’s urn of discovery: “Nick Bostrom’s jar with white balls, and there’s one black ball, and you take out a white ball, and white ball, and white ball, and then you hit the black ball and that’s the end of you. I don’t think it’s like that, because every white ball you take out and have reduces the number of black balls in the jar.”

When an asteroid caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction 66 million years ago, wiping out about 76 percent of all species on the planet at the time, those species effectively hit the inverse of a “black ball”—they needed asteroid defense technology, which humans have recently developed, but they didn’t have it. And similar stories could be told about all the other mass extinction events in Earth’s history, and the future mass extinctions that are bound to come if humans don’t advance technology fast enough.

While increasing intelligence, artificial or otherwise, poses serious threats to humanity, stagnating or declining intelligence is an even surer death knell.

AI of the sort powerful enough to wipe out humans is likely also a panacea for discovering and preventing virtually infinite other existential threats, biological, cosmic, and otherwise.

While existential risks create especially salient examples of the possible upsides and downsides of intelligence, the same logic applies to morally virtuous action generally. If there are moral truths to be discovered and known, general intelligence should be able to know them no matter what substrate it exists on. Knowledge is knowledge, whether encoded in brain chemicals or silicon chips.

As Deutsch argues in an interview with Sam Harris, “…the problem of AIs is the problem of humans. …humans are dangerous, and to that extent AIs are also dangerous, but the idea that AIs are somehow more dangerous than humans is racist.”

I think Deutsch’s racism charge is lobbed somewhat jokingly, but it also points to a deep similarity between bias against the agency of foreign peoples and that of mysterious artificial intelligences. Lovecraft has been widely accused of racism for his fearful treatment of foreign cultures and peoples, which seems of a piece with his general fear and distrust of the unknown. There is no reason to assume that perceptions of AI entities would not sometimes be shaded by the same underlying prejudices, which have their utility as protection against unknown threats but which can also lead people to dark and destructive attitudes and behaviors.

If people should be pessimistic about the consequences of artificial intelligence, they should also be pessimistic about the consequences of intelligence generally. Conversely, if optimism is warranted about human agency, which is fundamentally a matter of human intelligence, then optimism about artificial intelligence is warranted also.

In several previous articles, I have argued that the growth of knowledge, while not guaranteed to be morally good, has positive expected moral consequences. In other words, it is a morally good bet, so we should pursue it.

This is because we currently know sufficiently little about morality that improving our expected moral knowledge is currently a better investment than acting on our present understanding (or lack thereof) in any way that prevents or slows improvements to our knowledge. (I go into greater detail about this in my introduction to knowledge maximalism, my article on the moral principle of the Enlightenment, my article on Heinlein’s “Great Research” and MacAskill’s “Long Reflection,” and my article on Pascal’s Wager.)

This prescription has led some to ask why we should conclude that the growth of knowledge is good, rather than merely neutral or even counterproductive for achieving whatever really matters. What if we pursue the growth of knowledge in an effort to correct our moral misconceptions, only to discover that we have been rowing the boat in the wrong direction all along? Would we then have fared better not to embark on the journey of Enlightenment at all?

That is a possibility, but there is an asymmetry between the pursuit of knowledge and its opposite. The asymmetry should lead us to pursue the growth of knowledge, despite the risk that doing so is neutral or counterproductive. The asymmetry is this: The pursuit of knowledge tends toward self-correction, while the hindrance or prevention of the growth of knowledge does not.

You can think of the pursuit and rejection of knowledge as two columns on a table. Each column involves risk, but only the knowledge-seeking column contains a mechanism for self-correction.

That self-correction in the “pursuit of knowledge” column makes the risk less devastating in the knowledge-seeking column than it is in the knowledge-rejecting column. If you’re pursuing knowledge and it turns out to be evil to do so, your pursuit of knowledge at least pushes you in the direction of discovering your mistake, at which point you can change course. If you’re rejecting knowledge and it turns out to be evil to do so, your knowledge rejection is not pushing you toward self-correction. You’ll probably never discover your error or correct course, and if you somehow do, it is more likely to be despite your rejection of knowledge than because of it.

(Note: Pascal’s Wager is wrong primarily because it lacks this asymmetric advantage against some alternative wagers.)

Therefore, we should choose to be in the “pursuit of knowledge” column, despite the chance that it is neutral or counterproductive to do so.

An older version of this article was published by the Foundation for Economic Education on 10/3/2022.

During his latest appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, a nearly 3-hour interview released earlier this week, JD Vance laid out what policies he would prioritize if he were setting policy. As US Vice President he does not set the agenda of the current administration, but he does have the ear of the President as well as other significant forms of influence. Also, he is currently considered by far the most likely Republican presidential nominee for 2028 (Polymarket has him in first place at 41 percent and has Marco Rubio in second place at 27 percent). His policy priorities are therefore highly relevant.

He brought up only two policy areas, mentioning them each repeatedly throughout the last half hour of the interview. One of them is the empowerment of labor unions to negotiate more effectively with corporations. The other is the use of antitrust law to more aggressively attack big technology companies.

Vance explains during one of his multiple mentions of antitrust:

I think antitrust is a huge piece of the story. Now, it’s a little early with AI because we don’t yet know which companies are dominant, but I think one of the big mistakes, man, we made in the early 2000s is we should have gone after the big tech companies with antitrust. There is a trustbusting mechanism that exists in the US government. We just didn’t use it. We’re going to have to be willing to use it in the 21st century.

To understand the truly destructive nature of his embrace of antitrust, and to understand how he would likely try to use antitrust law to effectuate his vision if given the chance, an examination of one of his favorite federal bureaucrats is in order.

Lina Khan and JD Vance

Former FTC Chair Lina Khan is a radical antitrust lawyer who earned a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School in 2017 (Vance had earned the same degree from the same school five years earlier). Khan was appointed Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) by President Joe Biden in 2021. She held the position until President Donald Trump took office and replaced her with Andrew Ferguson in 2025. But JD Vance has repeatedly expressed admiration for her and her antitrust agenda, which redefines the purpose and nature of antitrust to radically expand its power over private business.

“A lot of my Republican colleagues look at Lina Khan … and they say, ‘well Lina Khan is sort of engaged in some sort of fundamental evil thing,” Vance said in February 2024, commenting on her aggression against big tech companies. “And I guess I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.”

In August 2024 he said, “Well, look, I don't agree with Lina Khan on every issue, to be clear, but I think that she's been very smart about trying to go after some of these big tech companies that monopolize what we're allowed to say in our own country.”

So what exactly is the Lina Khan antitrust agenda?

Rejecting Consumer Welfare

Throughout much of the history of antitrust legislation in the United States, its stated purpose has been to protect consumers from corporations gaining monopoly powers over the prices and quality of goods and services.

“Courts have applied the antitrust laws to changing markets, from a time of horse and buggies to the present digital age,” explains the Federal Trade Commission in a publication at ftc.gov. “Yet for over 100 years, the antitrust laws have had the same basic objective: to protect the process of competition for the benefit of consumers, making sure there are strong incentives for businesses to operate efficiently, keep prices down, and keep quality up.”

Lina Khan explicitly rejects this limited mandate on behalf of a broader scope for antitrust legislation. She believes in going after promising technology companies in nascent markets generally, not just the ones that have achieved monopoly status, in order to smother out the ambition of plausible future monopolists in its crib. Moreover, her sights are set elsewhere than on the old-fashioned “benefit of consumers.”

In 2018 when Khan was just beginning her career as a law scholar, the New York Times explained her novel view of antitrust enforcement in an article titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Antagonist Has a Breakthrough Idea” and subtitled “With a single scholarly article, Lina Khan, 29, has reframed decades of monopoly law.”

Khan’s 2017 Yale Law Journal article “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” argued that Amazon was simply too successful to go on unmolested by government obstruction, the wellbeing of the consumers be damned.

“Her argument went against a consensus in antitrust circles that dates back to the 1970s — the moment when regulation was redefined to focus on consumer welfare, which is to say price,” the Times reports. “Since Amazon is renowned for its cut-rate deals, it would seem safe from federal intervention. Ms. Khan disagreed. Over 93 heavily footnoted pages, she presented the case that the company should not get a pass on anticompetitive behavior just because it makes customers happy.”

Khan admitted to the Times that, “As consumers, as users, we love these tech companies.” But as her Yale Law Journal article says, “Animating these critiques is not a concern about harms to consumer welfare, but the broader set of ills and hazards that a lack of competition breeds.”

The article concludes, “To revise antitrust law and competition policy for platform markets, we should be guided by two questions. First, does our legal framework capture the realities of how dominant firms acquire and exercise power in the internet economy? And second, what forms and degrees of power should the law identify as a threat to competition? Without considering these questions, we risk permitting the growth of powers that we oppose but fail to recognize.”

As the Times summarizes, “The issue Ms. Khan’s article really brought to the fore is this: Do we trust Amazon, or any large company, to create our future?”

Expanding the Scope of Antitrust

Once appointed FTC Chair, Khan took her views of antitrust applicability to a new level. Seemingly emboldened by her disregard for consumer welfare, she dispensed with an assumption that was previously foundational in antitrust thinking: Its exclusive application to monopolies that have already formed or begun the formation process. Instead, Khan aimed to prevent the monopolies of the future by preventing new technologies from being developed in the first place.

When the New York Times interviewed Khan in 2022, they asked her, “Can your work really rein in tech, which often outpaces rule-making and policy?” And in her reply, she explained that, “I think this goes back to being attentive to these next-generation technologies and next-generation innovations in nascent industries across sectors. Those can really help us tackle problems at the inception.”

The following month, Khan put her plan into action by filing an injunction to block Meta from acquiring Within, a small virtual-reality start-up key to Meta’s plans to develop the “metaverse.”

In the lawsuit, which named Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg as a defendant, the F.T.C. emphasized that, “…Meta could have chosen to try to compete with Within on the merits; instead, Meta decided it preferred to simply buy [the property].”

The significance of the move was not lost on The New York Times, which noted Khan was “upending antitrust standards” by shifting its role from dismantling monopolies to launching preemptive actions.

“Lina Khan may set off a shift in how Washington regulates competition by filing cases in tech areas before they mature,” the Times reported.

As the Wall Street Journal explained at the time, there were many reasons that Meta’s acquisition of Within would not remotely constitute the use or accretion of monopoly power. But as the Times explained, “At the heart of the F.T.C.’s lawsuit is the idea that regulators can apply antitrust law without waiting for a market to mature to the point where it is clear which companies hold the most power.”

Smothering Technological Progress in Its Crib

As FTC Chair, Khan was aiming to achieve the exact opposite of what ftc.gov claims is the purpose of ensuring market competition through antitrust enforcement: “…lower prices, higher quality products and services, more choices, and greater innovation.”

Her approach, if successful, would not only increase prices for existing technologies, but the prevention of mergers and acquisitions of tech companies would disincentivize the creation of new tech startups and thus likely reduce the amount of innovation and the choices of products on the market as well.

As the abovementioned Wall Street Journal article notes, it’s no secret that venture capitalists “often fund startups on the hope that they will be bought by larger companies.” And just like venture capitalists, profit-seeking investors and entrepreneurs of all sorts are more likely to build tech startups in an environment of frequent acquisition offers than they would be if that potential revenue stream is outlawed by the state.

The big companies will also be disincentivized from investing in developing new technologies, because they’ll know that antitrust crackdown will render such ambitions less profitable and more risky. And even when tech companies choose to pursue new technological projects despite this bad incentive structure, progress will be much slower because they’ll be forcefully prevented from capitalizing on the best new innovations of smaller companies, even though the smaller companies would benefit from their involvement or else turn down their offers.

This is a recipe for dramatically slowing humanity’s ability to make technological and scientific progress.

Corporate Power Is Consumer Power

Technological progress is one of the key ways that human beings improve the quality of life for themselves and each other. Technology has significantly increased the average human life expectancy by diminishing the prevalence of disease, starvation, and even violence in human society. It has drastically reduced the portion of humanity engaging in dangerous and unpleasant labor for a living. And it represents the best chance of defending against climate change and other risks of the future without impoverishing developing nations to the point of mass starvation.

The specific companies, industries, and technologies in the sights of Lina Khan and JD Vance are not exceptions. I’ve made essentially this case in articles about the genesis of the metaverse, the future of the metaverse, the employment effects of AI, the existential implications of AI, the history of Microsoft and Amazon, and the property claims associated with those companies, which you can read if you’d like to know more.

So beyond Khan’s explicit abandonment of consumer welfare lies an implicit crusade against it. The premise that private businesses should be prevented from becoming economically powerful misses the point that how they do so is by successfully building and distributing products that large numbers of consumers want to use. By preventing business deals and investments that would have happened if left up to the free market, Khan and Vance prevent consumers from accessing products that would have either benefited them on their own terms or failed in the market.

In his classic 1949 book Human Action, the economist Ludwig Von Mises explains the consumer’s role in which new technologies become successful on the free market:

What counts alone is the degree of superiority secured by the new invention as against old methods. Superiority means reduction in the cost of production per unit or such an improvement in the quality of the product that buyers are ready to pay adequately higher prices. The absence of a sufficient degree of superiority to make the cost of transformation profitable is proof of the fact that consumers are more intent upon acquiring other goods than upon enjoying the benefits of the new invention. It is the consumers with whom the ultimate decision rests.

Preventing corporations from wielding economic power in the free market means destroying consumer power as well. The only kind of power Khan and Vance are looking to advance is the power of coercive regulatory institutions, to the detriment of corporations and consumers alike.

If you don’t “trust Amazon, or any large company, to create our future,” as the Times summarizes the crux of Khan’s work, you don’t have to purchase their products. If that small level of influence isn’t enough for you, you can only have further influence by coercively taking away the basic freedoms of others to consume the products they want and do business with who they wish.

Meta won the lawsuit over their acquisition of Within in 2023, and throughout Khan’s tenure as FTC Chair she lodged countless such attacks on tech companies small and large, and in most cases her radical new antitrust vision was struck down by the courts. For now, the limited mandate of antitrust law has yet to be corrupted to the degree that Khan would have liked. But what if Vance or some other Khan enthusiast were elected president in 2028 or beyond? He could appoint judges more favorable to Khan’s vision, or he could launch an effort to ignore and subvert judicial oversight, as he has expressed explicit interest in doing.

The future of American industrial freedom, the world’s most powerful engine of technological progress and human prosperity, likely hinges in some significant measure on such people being kept out of political power.

One of the most famous arguments in Christian apologetics is Pascal’s Wager. Pascal writes in his posthumously published 1670 book Pensées (as translated by W.F. Trotter), “Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.” (The subsequent pages go into more detail about the decision theory of the wager, but I will not belabor the technicalities here.)

This argument was revolutionary because, while acknowledging uncertainty as to the truth of God’s existence, it attempted to make an expected value calculation to manage the risk of being wrong about God. Having co-invented modern probability theory in correspondence with Pierre de Fermat about 14 years earlier, Pascal was the first to explicitly apply the mathematics of expected value to moral decision-making. Such reasoning is now commonplace in moral philosophy.

Pascal’s Wager is widely considered by atheists, as well as many theologians, to be refuted. Some theologians will defend it, but it is less ubiquitous than arguments such as the cosmological argument and the teleological argument.

A key objection to the argument is the “many gods objection.” This is the objection that Pascal’s Wager rests on the false dichotomy of nihilism and a particular conception of God. If those are the only two possibilities, then you should bet on God if you can, because you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. But obviously there are infinite other possibilities as well, all of which have their possible negation. To cite just two examples, Conservative Evangelical Protestant Christianity and Ash’ari Sunni Islam each have conflicting doctrines. If one is true, paradise awaits its adherents and Hell awaits adherents of the other, and vice versa. And those are just two of infinite conflicting possibilities.

Therefore, Pascal’s critics argue, the wager argument could lead you to bet on infinite different doctrines, and to make matters worse each bet would also be a bet against your doctrine’s theoretical negation, and so the wager gets you nowhere.

This criticism is true as far as it goes, but stopping the analysis there misses out on a valuable element of Pascal’s argument. Pascal was trying to solve a real problem that, for many, remains unacknowledged: you have no choice but to wager on uncertain moral doctrines. Responding to the argument that you are less likely to lose if you refrain from wagering at all, Pascal points out, “Yes, but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then?” To refrain from wagering, fallible beings would have to pause the passage of time, and even then they would only be delaying the impending wager on how best to spend the resources of their life.

Given this necessity to wager, paired with the seemingly paralyzing “many gods objection,” what is there to do?

To answer that, it must be noted that the wager is not just a one-time thing. Every moment of action or inaction is a new wager. In other words, after this moment’s wager, you’ll almost always get another chance to wager.

Given that context, all doctrines are not equal. Some moral doctrines, or “gods,” if you like, improve the wagerer’s chances in future wagers, while others diminish them. They do this by increasing or decreasing the wagerer’s body of knowledge, equipping them with a better or worse basis on which to place wagers.

The wager can improve the wagerer’s future odds through direct knowledge acquisition, but also through indirect positioning improvements. For example, working a lucrative job or making financial investments often provides direct improvements to the wagerer’s understanding of the world, but increased financial prosperity also indirectly increases the wagerer’s expected all-time knowledge set by increasing the sustainability of their life and therefore giving them more time, resources, and stability for future knowledge improvements.

No two doctrines will virtually ever be equally conducive to the long-term growth of knowledge. For example, even if we have equal credence in the truth value of Christianity and Islam, one of these sets of doctrines will be more conducive than the other to human flourishing, to the continued pursuit of truth, to sustaining human civilization. And in this manner all competing doctrines can theoretically be placed on a hierarchy from most to least conducive to the continued improvement of knowledge. Whatever is at the top of that hierarchy is what Pascal should have wagered on, and what we should wager on now.

With the complex doctrines that enjoy widespread adherence today, such as Christianity and Islam, it is difficult to determine which are more or less conducive to the growth of knowledge. While it seems that Christianity (with its mandate to “render unto Caeser” and so on) generally beats Islam (with its doctrines of Sharia, Jihad, and so on), this is a topic for historians, theologians, psychologists, and economists to debate. Even harder are the more granular debates, such as those about Catholicism versus Protestantism, Sunni versus Shia, and so on.

But one thing is clear: we can posit a theoretical doctrine, “knowledge maximalism,” and know that this is the doctrine that we should wager on. We are then left with the hard work of figuring out how best to maximize knowledge. Is capitalism or socialism more conducive to the long-term maximization of knowledge? What about veganism or meat eating? Lying to our wives or being honest with them? And so on.

While Pascal’s Wager is flawed because it presupposes a particular conception of the ultimate good, this new “knowledge maximalist’s wager” does not attempt to specify the correct payoff function in advance. Instead, it seeks to improve the wagerer’s capacity to evaluate and pursue whatever payoff function would ultimately prove most compelling. While never explained quite this way during the 18^th century Age of Enlightenment, I believe this was a core element of the Enlightenment meta-ethic. Enlightenment thinkers disagreed strongly about the nature of morality. Bentham favored maximizing utility, while Kant defended his categorical imperative, and so on. But they were all part of the “Enlightenment” because they perpetuated the ethos that treats such theories as fallible and subject to potential improvement, and bets that the process of expanding human knowledge will improve the expected value of such theories generally.

If we make an effort to live in such a way that our body of knowledge is improving to the greatest and most sustainable extent possible, we will be maximizing our chances in the continuous moral gambling necessitated by living a fallible life.

This article was published at Human Progress on 6/24/2026.

In his 1942 novel Beyond This Horizon, the classic science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein explores the problem of nihilism or aimlessness that can befall a prosperous civilization. The cover of the book’s first edition reads, “The intriguing novel of a future Earth when science and technology have solved all problems – except the ‘why’ of life.”

This predicament of material prosperity combined with moral aimlessness is at least as resonant today as it was when Heinlein wrote in the mid-20^th century. What some researchers describe as a “crisis of purpose,” as well as my own personal knowledge of many of my peers, suggests that many people in developed society struggle to find a strong basis for moral conviction. Some cannot accept theological dogmas themselves but hope for a religious revival to rescue civilization from encroaching nihilism. Some believe that humans must agree on a set of broad humanist morals even while admitting an inability to offer firm grounding for such morals. Others advocate and celebrate the abolition of moral norms and standards altogether.

Heinlein imagines a different path forward.

When Hamilton Felix, one of the main characters in Beyond This Horizon, is offered the opportunity to contribute to the human race’s sustained prosperity, he questions why he should bother. An official named Mordan explains to Felix that by participating in a largely costless program he can aid in humanity’s far-future survival, but Felix replies, “Even so, I know of no reason why the human race should survive... There’s no point to being alive at all. I’m damned if I’ll contribute to continuing the comedy.” After Mordan continues attempting to persuade him, Felix replies, “Survival! What for? Until you can give me some convincing explanation why the human race should go on at all, my answer is ‘no.’”

Later in the book, Felix is again called upon to hear out Mordan. This time, Mordan has devised a response to Felix’s question about the “why” of it all. “I don’t propose to give you an answer here and now,” Mordan admits. But he asks, “Would you be willing to cooperate if you knew that a serious attempt was being made to answer your question?”

Mordan explains that, “Such a research might not be completed in years, or in our lifetimes. But suppose I declare to you that such a research were to be attempted, seriously, hard headedly, all out, and no trouble spared, would you then consent to co-operate?”

I shall not needlessly spoil Felix’s response, except to give away that this “Great Research” does eventually begin, and the characters of the novel realize that its scope and scale must be very grand in order to rise to the vastness of the project of searching the universe for moral truth. The narrator explains:

The Great Research in its opening phases seemed to fall into half a dozen major projects, some of which interested him more than others because they gave some hope of producing results during his lifetime. Some, however, were almost as colossal as the building of the Grand Eidouranion. The distribution of life through the physical universe, for example, and the possibility that other, nonhuman intelligences existed somewhere. If there were such, then it was possible, with an extremely high degree of mathematical probability, that some of them, at least, were more advanced than men. In which case they might give Man a “leg up” in his philosophical education. They might have discovered “Why” as well as “How.”

This fictional “Great Research” project of an epistemically mature, non-dogmatic civilization bears striking resemblance to a real prescription from leading moral philosophers in the 21^st century. The University of Oxford philosophers William MacAskill and Toby Ord, founders of the highly influential effective altruism movement, have advocated what is often called the “Long Reflection” (a term coined by MacAskill).

These philosophers admit that, relative to the grand timescale of human history, humanity may not have made much progress yet in developing robust moral theories. But rather than conceding to nihilism, they point out that moral questions may not be impossible to answer even if they are so difficult that little to no progress has yet been made. Moral philosophy may still be in its infancy, like physics before Newton or biology before Darwin. In 1790 Immanuel Kant famously declared that “there will never be a Newton of the blade of grass,” failing to imagine that something as chaotic and complex as biological life could ever be subjected to a rigorous scientific theory. Darwin arguably proved him wrong less than a century later, and likewise, some future moral theorists may prove the nihilists and dogmatists wrong in ways not yet conceived.

Thus, the Oxford philosophers propose the Long Reflection: a hypothetical period of centuries, millennia, or longer for humanity to investigate moral questions instead of calling off the search for moral truth. As Ord explains it in his 2020 book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity:

During the Long Reflection, we would need to develop mature theories that allow us to compare the grand accomplishments our descendants might achieve with eons and galaxies as their canvas.

Present-day humans, myself included, are poorly positioned to anticipate the results of this reflection. But we are uniquely positioned to make it possible.

…

While moral philosophy would play a central role, the Long Reflection would require insights from many disciplines. For it isn’t just about determining which futures are best, but which are feasible in the first place, and which strategies are most likely to bring them about. This requires analysis from science, engineering, economics, political theory and beyond.

In his 2022 New York Times bestselling book What We Owe the Future, MacAskill elaborates:

I think we should accept that we don’t know what the ideal state would be; the primary question is how we can build a society such that, over time, our moral views improve… What we want to do is build a morally exploratory world: one structured so that, over time, the norms and institutions that are morally better are more likely to win out, leading us, over time, to converge on the best possible society.

As Heinlein depicts in his novel, and as Oxford philosophers Toby Ord, William MacAskill, and Nick Bostrom are now contending with, the post-Enlightenment scientifically sophisticated modern world is one in which no religious dogmas or naively adopted moral philosophies can be relied on to guide civilization. While plenty of radical sects still uphold their dogmas and fight for their causes, the baseline skepticism and belief siloing of the culture at large have become so strong that it is hard to imagine any one set of moral dogmas recapturing vast swaths of hearts and minds without a stronger philosophical basis than any already existing ideology has yet demonstrated.

But in such a society it is understood that the most important truths about the world are likely not yet discovered. Nihilism, like any other moral theory yet developed, should be considered too premature to win the day. Thus, epistemically mature society must not succumb to moral aimlessness. Rather, it must be devoted to the moral pursuit of expanding Enlightenment and expanding the scope and scale of human knowledge.

This is an updated version of an article that was published at the Foundation for Economic Education on 7/18/2019.

There is an allegedly beautiful vision shared by many economists, policymakers, and workers: One day, it is supposed, working hours will become so productive that each worker will only have to work a few hours per week and then they will luxuriously spend the rest of their time on leisure.

The New Economics Foundation advocates for a 21-hour work week. Sociologist Peter Fleming suggests a three-day work week in his 2015 book The Mythology of Work. Historian Rutger Bregman argues in his bestselling 2017 book Utopia for Realists that a 15-hour work week is achievable and desirable. Business Insider claims that “The 40-hour week isn’t working anymore,” and advocates instead for a 15-hour work week. These are just a few of countless examples.

John Maynard Keynes, one of history’s most influential economists, predicted in 1930 that the grandchildren of his generation would enjoy 15-hour work weeks. The rest of the labor would be done by machines. This was a popular idea. In 1965, a Senate subcommittee projected that we would only work 14 hours per week by the year 2000.

These projections are now typically understood to have been wildly off. Productivity has indeed massively increased, and so have the material living standards of workers. But this has not seemed to result in the massive decline in working hours that many predicted.

According to recent data from Gallup, full-time employees were working an average of 42.9 hours per week as of 2024. This alone doesn’t mean that Keynes was wildly wrong. The math is a lot more complicated. Matthew Yglesias defends Keynes in a recent article by pointing out that, even if Keynes was wrong to imagine each work week being radically diminished, he may have been right to imagine that hours worked over a lifetime would go significantly down in some way. Yglesias points out that people spend many more years in retirement than they used to, and also that many hours of household drudgery have been transformed into leisure time by the spread of technological advancements such as washing machines and dishwashers.

But none of these people seem to question the assumption that more leisure time and fewer working hours would be a desirable outcome. Regardless of how accurate Keynes’s prediction was, I think the question of how desirable leisure time is compared to working hours is more important and less frequently discussed.

Leisure Versus Investment

When you gain access to a time-saving innovation such as a dishwasher or other labor-saving technology, you have two options: You can fritter away the newfound time on leisure and relaxation, or you can spend your extra time increasing your productivity. This dilemma of time expenditure is equivalent to the more frequently articulated dilemma of money expenditure. When you have extra money, you can temporarily increase your leisure (or your consumption of some other luxury good), or you can invest that money in future productivity gains.

And these are not new dilemmas introduced by modern technology. These problems have been with humanity since time immemorial. Whichever Stone Age hunters first invented the spear, the axe, the sling, and so on had these same two options. They could spend extra time on leisure, or they could use their newfound hunting abilities to bring extra meat home to their kin. Those who chose option B enabled more population growth and probably aided in our ability to exist today.

The cultivation of domestic crops and livestock over 10,000 years ago was probably one of the greatest innovations for economic growth in human history. For the first time, humans had the ability to create a massive food surplus. Yuval Noah Harari, professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explains in his international bestselling book Sapiens that, “With the move to permanent villages and the increase in food supply, the population began to grow. But the extra mouths quickly wiped out the food surpluses, so even more fields had to be planted.”

People theoretically could have chosen leisure over investment in new children and more crops. If everyone had chosen leisure, the population would not have boomed. If some people chose leisure, they were out-populated and outcompeted by those who chose investment. Harari calls the agricultural revolution “history’s biggest fraud” because the early agriculturalists likely intended to increase their leisure and instead increased their productivity.

Like the grandchildren of Keynes’s generation, they probably fantasized about using technological productivity gains to increase their leisure.

People in hunter-gatherer societies worked far fewer hours than people in agrarian and modern societies, but that is because they lacked the opportunities for productive work that more advanced societies offer. In their book Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know, Ronald Bailey and Marian Tupy explain:

Based on their observations of extant hunter-gatherer societies, scholars estimate that our foraging ancestors worked anywhere between 2.8 hours and 7.6 hours per day. Once they secured their food for the day, they stopped. The foragers’ workload was comparatively low, but so was their standard of living. Our ancestors’ wealth was limited to the weight of the possessions they could carry on their backs from one location to the next.

About 12,000 years ago, people started to settle down, cultivate crops, and domesticate animals. The total number of hours worked rose, but people were willing to sacrifice free time in exchange for a more stable food supply. Since artificial lighting was prohibitively expensive, daylight regulated the amount of work that could be done. In summer, most people worked between 6 and 10 hours in the fields and an additional 3 hours at home. In winter, daylight limited the total number of work hours to 8.

Only by developing the tools to productively work longer hours did agrarian societies lay the groundwork for the massive gains in safety, life expectancy, and wealth enjoyed by most people today.

To Stagnate or to Achieve Great Things?

We face the choice between leisure and productivity every day of our lives. As Harari points out, an email is a lot faster and cheaper to send than a snail mail letter. When email was invented, people could have made their lives more leisurely by writing to people just as infrequently as they ever did—and more efficiently than before. Instead, people invested their saved time in writing to more people and doing so more frequently. As a result, people are more productive through their email and just as stressed as they used to be.

Leisure is just one of countless nice things that increased productivity can buy. It is no more desirable, and ultimately probably far less desirable, than other things that can be achieved instead, such as more scientific knowledge, more medical research and other investments in health, improved safety, transportation technology, communications technology, and other upgrades to the human condition.

At any level of technological and economic advancement throughout the last many millennia of human civilization, humans could have stopped advancing and simply “taken it easy.” If they had done so, the “taking it easy” phase would have only lasted a short period, and then the human project would have stagnated or succumbed to any number of new threats that inevitably arise as the result of constant exogenous change. What is more, their “taking it easy” in the distant past would have included far more pain from horrible diseases, famines, wolves, tribal violence, and so on than the weekends, evenings, and vacations of most modern people. The project of human civilization and prosperity has gotten as far as it has because people often invested in the future instead of indulging in those temporary opportunities to “take it easy.”

None of this is to suggest that people should never take a day off, or never indulge in leisure or frivolous consumption and luxury. Sustainably accomplishing great things and creating value requires spending time and resources to rest, experience beauty, grow as an individual in ways that are hard to measure, and maintain psychological and physical wellbeing. Taking vacations, relaxing for some portion of every day, and partaking in some frivolity can be important aspects of this process. But the idea that productivity should serve the purpose of facilitating leisure, and not the other way around, puts leisure unfoundedly high on the hierarchy of achievable values. This is pessimistic. There are far greater things to be achieved.

When they put their mind to it, humans can imagine possible achievements of vast and heroic magnificence. If enough hard work and ingenuity is invested, humans could build or terraform new and better worlds in outer space, develop radically more illuminating scientific theories than have yet been fathomed, dramatically extend human life expectancy, and so on, ad infinitum.

As significant productivity gains continue to be made, instead of seeing this as an opportunity to shorten the work week, people could better serve themselves, their grandchildren, and humanity generally by thinking of the newfound wealth as an opportunity to keep working and gain more ground in the march toward greater and more brilliant horizons of human achievement.

Author’s Note: My first child was born earlier this month. Becoming a father has inspired me to republish (with some minor edits) the following article, which was originally published by the Foundation for Economic Education on 12/7/2021. It was written in response to the COVID-19-related slump in US population growth that was breaking news at the time, but its topic is of timeless importance, and its relevance hasn’t changed much in the years since its original release. The opportunity for Americans, and humans generally, to improve their lot by increasing the human population is as pressing as ever.

Population growth in the United States declined to an all-time low during the COVID-19 pandemic. Following a decade-long fertility slump, 2020 saw more people dying than being born in half of all US states. Early estimates suggest that the US population grew only 0.35 percent, the lowest rate ever recorded, and growth is expected to remain near flat this year, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal.

WSJ writers Janet Adamy and Anthony DeBarros report, “With the birthrate already drifting down, the nudge from the pandemic could result in what amounts to a scar on population growth, researchers say, which could be deeper than those left by historic periods of economic turmoil, such as the Great Depression and the stagnation and inflation of the 1970s, because it is underpinned by a shift toward lower fertility.”

The Malthusian View of Population

This demographic news comes at a time when limiting family size is widely encouraged in the media. Meghan Markle and Prince Harry won an award in 2021 for their “enlightened decision” to limit themselves to two children. And in response to a recent Census Bureau report of low population growth over the last decade, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in a New York Times column that “In fact, in a world of limited resources and major environmental problems there’s something to be said for a reduction in population pressure.”

And it does seem plausible at first glance that having fewer people would result in greater prosperity. Afterall, a larger population will lead to more resource consumption, which would seem to suggest that the average member of the population would have access to a smaller share of resources. This perspective has been popular ever since the economist Thomas Malthus published his seminal 1798 work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he argued that food supply could not possibly keep up with exponential population growth.

The Malthusian worldview has even been represented in popular culture in recent years, especially in the Marvel character of Thanos, the ultimate nemesis of the Avengers. As economist Gale Pooley has pointed out, In Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos plots to save humanity from economic collapse by halving the population of life in the universe, thus leaving the remaining half with double the resources.

While Thanos is portrayed as the villain, the film never really articulates the flaw in his logic. But there is, in fact, a fundamental flaw in Malthusian thinking, whether it comes from Malthus, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, Paul Krugman, or Thanos. And that flaw is known as the fixed pie fallacy.

The fixed pie fallacy is the idea that there is a fixed amount of resources in an economy, and that if there are more people to consume resources, the pie must be divided into smaller slices for each person. In this view, if the population continues to increase, eventually there will be more and more people left with nothing but crumbs. But this is a fallacy because in reality, each person is not just a pie consumer, but a pie maker as well. In other words, each new person is accompanied not only by a new mouth that consumes resources, but also a new mind and pair of hands that produce resources.

The question is whether the average person consumes more than she produces, or vice versa. If people generally consume more than they produce, then Malthusians may not be pessimistic enough, and even a stagnant population would be unsustainable. If, however, people produce more than they consume, then a growing population is likely a powerful force for the economic success of a civilization, and America’s relatively stagnant population is likely among the most economically devastating missed opportunities of our time.

Humans as Machines of Production

Any animal species of which the average member is more consumptive than productive will eventually go extinct. Squirrels cannot consume more nuts than they collect, lions cannot eat more zebras than they kill, and so on. Production must necessarily equal or exceed consumption. Most animals produce just barely enough to sustain themselves, and they increase their population in times of abundance, so they constantly live at subsistence.

In order for human civilization to become as wealthy as it has, the average human must have created far more wealth than she consumed. Judging by the vast cities, libraries of knowledge, vehicles, smartphones, computers, nuclear power plants, and other wealth abundant in modern society, the average human’s creative economic impact must exceed her destructive economic impact by multitudes. Otherwise, we would be living in a wilderness or a wasteland.

For most of human history, humanity did subsist only barely. Incomes almost never exceeded $3.50 per day in today’s dollars. But ever since the Industrial Revolution allowed humans to multiply their productivity with technology and science, economic growth per capita has skyrocketed and the portion of the population living in extreme poverty has diminished from over 80 percent to less than 10 percent. All of this occurred while the human population exploded from less than 1 billion in 1800 to over 8 billion today.

Given that economic growth comes from the productivity of people, the fact that the global economy has been growing rapidly, not stagnating or shrinking, almost every year for the last several centuries demonstrates that people are generally adding more wealth to the economy than they’re subtracting. Indeed, past population growth has been correlated, and likely causally linked, with economic growth, and there is no reason to think that additional people wouldn’t continue this trend.

Increasing the population is arguably wonderful for those coming into existence, who are given the beautiful gift of life. But in addition, adding people to our world is wonderful economically for those of us who already exist, because most people who are left relatively free to engage in economic activity contribute to the supply of labor and innovative thought, thus increasing the abundance of goods and services available in the economy.

Increasing the Division of Labor

The benefits of a larger population are more than just the fact that the average person produces more wealth than she consumes. There is also the important fact that a group of people engaging in the division of labor form an economy that is far greater than the sum of its parts. This happens because as a workforce grows, so do the opportunities of its members to specialize.

This is easy to see if you start with a small example.

If one person is alone on an island, she may spend half her working hours collecting coconuts from trees, and the other half building and maintaining her shelter and campsite. If, however, two people are together on the island and willing to trade, whichever one is relatively more suited to collecting coconuts (perhaps the taller one) can spend disproportionate working hours doing that, and whichever is relatively more suited to campsite maintenance (perhaps the more mechanically inclined one) can spend disproportionate working hours doing that. This will result in the set of tasks getting done more efficiently than they would without the division of labor, because of each person being relatively more suited to their task and also because of the greater accumulation of expertise each person will gain by specializing.

Any two people are at least slightly differentially optimized for any given task, because personal preferences, relevant experience, aptitudes, and even physical location in space at a particular moment are all variables that differ from person to person and affect how well a given task can be completed. Therefore, an increased division of labor will virtually always have the potential to yield economic benefits.

It is important to note that, even if one side of a trading partnership is better at everything, both parties still gain from the division of labor. This is shown by the classical economist David Ricardo in his theory of comparative advantage.

Ricardo’s theory was initially described in the context of international trade between nations, but it applies just as well to trade between individuals. Callum Williams, senior economics writer at The Economist, summarizes the theory well in his book The Classical School: The Birth of Economics in 20 Enlightened Lives. “In a nutshell, Ricardo shows that international trade allows countries to buy commodities at a better price–that is, with the loss of less labour time–than they can get at home,” Williams writes. “But crucially, he demonstrates that two countries can benefit from international trade even if one is better than the other at producing everything.”

Earlier trade theory from the founder of modern economics Adam Smith made clear that if one party is better at producing cloth while another is better at producing wine, then the two parties can mutually benefit from specializing in producing cloth and wine, respectively. But Ricardo’s logic shows trade to be even more widely useful than that. As Williams explains:

A helpful way to remember comparative advantage is as follows: England exports the cloth and Portugal exports the wine. Ricardo imagined that Portugal was better at producing both cloth and wine than England–ie, that it could produce both these commodities with less labour input than England. According to the Smithian approach, it would seem to make sense for Portugal to import nothing from England. In Smith’s language, the “foreign country”, in this case England, “can [not] supply [Portugal] with a commodity cheaper than [Portugal] can make it”.

Ricardo’s logic goes a step further. The question is, which is Portugal relatively better at producing, wine or cloth? In Ricardo’s example, Portugal was relatively more efficient at producing wine, meaning that Portugal would have to give up less cloth to make extra wine than England would. It follows, according to Ricardo, that Portugal should produce wine, and England cloth. Portugal exports wine, England exports cloth. Under that arrangement, both England and Portugal can consume more cloth and wine than under any other arrangement.

And what’s more, there is a fundamental asymmetry between each person as a “pie consumer” and a “pie producer”: Adding more consumers is merely arithmetical (if people consume more than they used to, it is because they are richer and can afford to), whereas adding more producers can increase production exponentially.

Scaling Up from the Island

Population size has been a crucial aspect of economic progress from the marketplaces of the Stone Age to those of modern times. In his book The Rational Optimist, biologist Matt Ridley elucidates how insufficient population sizes held back hunter-gatherer societies by limiting their division of labor.

“A band of a hundred people cannot sustain more than a certain number of tools, for the simple reason that both the production and the consumption of tools require a minimum size of market,” Ridley writes. “People will only learn a limited set of skills and if there are not enough experts to learn one rare skill from, they will lose that skill. A good idea, manifest in bone, stone or string, needs to be kept alive by numbers.”

Ridley discusses the catastrophic example of Tasmania, which was cut off from Australia by rising sea levels in the Bass Strait about 10,000 years ago. “Isolated on an island at the end of the world, a population of less than 5,000 hunter-gatherers divided into nine tribes did not just stagnate, or fail to progress. They fell steadily and gradually back into a simpler toolkit and lifestyle, purely because they lacked the numbers to sustain their existing technology,” Ridley explains. “By the time Europeans first encountered Tasmanian natives, they found them not only to lack many of the skills and tools of their mainland cousins, but to lack many technologies that their own ancestors had once possessed.”

Adam Smith put it simply in his classic 1776 book The Wealth of Nations when he wrote that, “The division of labor is limited by the extent of the market.”

Fast forward to contemporary times, and the correlation between demographic growth and economic prosperity suggests the vast significance of an increasingly large and specialized labor force. Ruchir Sharma reports in Foreign Affairs magazine:

To get a better handle on how demographics will limit national economies in the future, I looked at population trends in the 56 cases since 1960 in which a country sustained economic growth of at least six percent for a decade or more. On average, the working-age population grew at 2.7 percent during these booms, suggesting that explosions in the number of workers deserve a great deal of the credit for economic miracles. This connection has played out in dozens of cases, from Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s to Malaysia in the 1960s through the 1990s.

Moreover, Sharma notes:

Indeed, countries with shrinking working-age populations have found it nearly impossible to produce strong economic growth. Going back to 1960, there are 698 decadelong periods for which data on a country’s population growth and GDP growth are available. In 38 of these cases, the working-age population shrank. The average GDP growth rate in these countries was a measly 1.5 percent.

In their annual Simon Abundance Index, Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley have shown that population growth is positively correlated with resource abundance at the global scale. As they explain in their 2025 release:

The Simon Abundance Index (SAI) measures the relationship between resource abundance and population. It converts the per capita abundance of 50 basic commodities and the size of the global population into a single value. The index began in 1980 with a base value of 100. In 2024, the SAI stood at 618.4, indicating that resources have become 518.4 percent more abundant over the past 44 years. All 50 commodities in the dataset were more abundant in 2024 than they were in 1980. The global abundance of resources increased at a compound annual growth rate of 4.22 percent, thus doubling every 17 years.

Of Monkeys and Shakespeare

There’s a theorem that says if you give enough monkeys typewriters and enough time, they’ll produce Shakespeare. Likewise, add enough humans to the marketplace and they’ll produce self-driving cars, spaceships, synthetic meat, the internet, NFTs, Neuralink, nuclear power plants, CRISPR, 3D-printed replacement limbs, and also Shakespeare.

The reason you can find Reddit threads about such niche information and such specific problems you’re trying to solve or hobbies you’re exploring, and the reason your large language models such as ChatGPT can be trained on such narrowly applicable information, is thanks to the vastness of humanity’s division of labor. Indeed, the vast tapestry of human cultural diversity, with all the dividends it yields, is in large part a product of the division of labor.

New forms of labor and specializations of knowledge are being invented every day, partly because so many people exist that a highly diverse marketplace can be sustained. In principle, there would be effectively no limit of problems to solve and tasks to valuably accomplish if there were only enough innovators to specialize in them. Therefore, mutual economic gains from an expanding marketplace can increase virtually indefinitely.

And the more these mutual gains proliferate, the more harmonious people’s interests generally become. As the economist Ludwig von Mises wrote in his 1949 masterpiece Human Action:

The very condition from which the irreconcilable conflicts of biological competition arise–viz., the fact that all people by and large strive after the same things–is transformed [by the division of labor] into a factor making for harmony of interests. Because many people or even all people want bread, clothes, shoes, and cars, large-scale production of these goods becomes feasible and reduces the costs of production to such an extent that they are accessible at low prices. The fact that my fellow man wants to acquire shoes as I do, does not make it harder for me to get shoes, but easier.

The Malthusian idea that a growing population is one in which each individual will find it ever-harder to get by may be true for most animal species (since they don’t typically specialize and trade), but in modern human society just the opposite is so.

2023 Pew research says that 51 percent of young adults who aren’t parents say that they would like to have children one day. Meanwhile, 30 percent aren’t sure, and only 18 percent say they don’t want to have children. This widespread openness to procreation is an opportunity to shift the cultural incentives in favor of having more children, for the enormous benefit of the children themselves who otherwise will not be given the beautiful gift of life, but also to promote the harmony and prosperity of society at large.

If humans want to expand our economic and social flourishing, a top priority should be increasing the human population. Who knows, we might even enjoy ourselves in the process.

Prior to the Scientific Revolution and broader Age of Enlightenment, it was generally assumed that all important knowledge was already known.

In his massively bestselling book Sapiens, Hebrew University of Jerusalem historian Yuval Noah Harari explains:

The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions.

Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known. The great gods, or the one almighty God, or the wise people of the past possessed all-encompassing wisdom, which they revealed to us in scriptures and oral traditions. Ordinary mortals gained knowledge by delving into these ancient texts and traditions and understanding them properly. It was inconceivable that the Bible, the Qur’an or the Vedas were missing out on a crucial secret of the universe – a secret that might yet be discovered by flesh-and-blood creatures.

As Harari elucidates in his book, “Modern-day science is a unique tradition of knowledge, inasmuch as it openly admits collective ignorance regarding the most important questions.” For example, “After centuries of extensive scientific research, biologists admit that they still don’t have any good explanation for how brains produce consciousness. Physicists admit that they don’t know what caused the Big Bang, or how to reconcile quantum mechanics with the theory of general relativity.”

In the face of this newfound collective ignorance, some humans despair, but others rejoice. Two geniuses of expansive vision in the 20^th century, the classic horror author H. P. Lovecraft and the influential philosopher of science Karl Popper, represent these two extremes well.

A central theme in Lovecraft’s work is the horror of discovering how nightmarish the deep truths of the universe really are. Most of his stories are about science or exploration uncovering horrible realities that should have never been discovered and cannot be unlearned. The opening paragraph of The Call of Cthulhu (1928), probably his most famous story, illustrates this attitude well:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

While this quote is from a work of fiction, that attitude toward the advancement of human knowledge permeates both his fiction and nonfiction writings. For example, in the 1933 nonfiction essay “Some Repetitions on the Times,” Lovecraft vilifies technological automation as a source of mass unemployment that must be prevented by government subversion of the “laissez-faire system.” Technological progress must be fought against, Lovecraft argues, “if the peril of an unfathomed revolutionary abyss is to be averted.”

The checking of Lovecraft’s century-old fears against current unemployment rates, and the comparisons to contemporary AI doomerism, pretty much write themselves.

Conversely, Karl Popper saw in the vastness of human ignorance a great cause for optimism. If humans have an infinity yet to learn, he reasons, then science can progress human knowledge and the human standard of living unboundedly into the future. In Volume 2 of Popper’s 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, he writes:

First, although in science we do our best to find the truth, we are conscious of the fact that we can never be sure whether we have got it. We have learned in the past, from many disappointments, that we must not expect finality. And we have learned not to be disappointed any longer if our scientific theories are overthrown; for we can, in many cases, determine with great confidence which of the two theories is the better one. We can therefore know that we are making progress; and it is this knowledge that to most of us atones for the loss of the illusion of finality and certainty. In other words, we know that our scientific theories must always remain hypotheses, but that, in many important cases, we can find out whether or not a new hypothesis is superior to an old one. For if they are different, then they will lead to different predictions, which can often be tested experimentally; and on the basis of such a crucial experiment, we can sometimes find out that the new theory leads to satisfactory results where the old one breaks down. Thus we can say that in our search for truth, we have replaced scientific certainty by scientific progress.

Is Lovecraft’s or Popper’s attitude toward the future of human enlightenment more compelling? The future is highly uncertain, but as I have argued at length in the past, the logical conclusion of stagnating human knowledge is the death of humanity and all life on Earth, because the environment is always changing and thus mass extinction is the rule, not the exception. Countless existential threats exist out there in the universe, known and unknown, one or more of which will be the downfall of any species that aren’t able to adapt through scientific and technological advancement.

If human knowledge continues to expand, this expansion might cause the end of humanity through deadly artificial intelligence, viral bioweapons, or some other self-inflicted horror. But at least this way, humanity has a fighting chance to deflect asteroids, cure diseases, terraform other planets, spread out into space, and build an amazing future of continued and exponentiating technological abundance.

A version of this article was published by the Libertarian Institute on 1/12/2026.

Tucker Carlson, who has recently been identified in the New York Times as “arguably at this point the most significant media figure on the American right,” gave a telling account of his political priorities in his speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in late December.

“All I really care about is that the people in charge care—that they love the people they lead,” he explained from the podium. “That is the first and most important requirement of leadership. A father who loves his children may make mistakes… but if he loves his kids, he’ll do a pretty good job and they’ll do fine.” Likewise, Carlson analogizes, “The president who truly loves his people will, over time, tend to make wiser decisions on their behalf. But the leaders who don’t care at all? They’ll destroy your country, and that is absolutely what we’ve had.”

This was not an anomalous diagnosis from Carlson. He has frequently made that same basic argument, such as when he went on comedian Theo Von’s podcast last month:

What really matters is the willingness of your leaders to actually die for you as you would for your children. Like, it’s that simple. If they love you, your country will prosper. If they hate you, it will fail. It’s super simple. They don’t like us.

This repeated analogizing of federal government employees to parental figures on whom we should depend for love could hardly be less accurate or more dangerous. Indeed, it suggests a profoundly authoritarian and sycophantic view of the federal government.

To understand why, a summary of the basic nature of tax-funded governance is warranted. In his seminal 1974 essay Anatomy of the State, economist Murray Rothbard gives a concise overview:

Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion. While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet.

Also helpfully, Rothbard goes further than describing the basic nature of tax-funded institutions. He explains the timeless logic of how such institutions come about in the first place:

Man is born naked into the world, and needing to use his mind to learn how to take the resources given him by nature, and to transform them (for example, by investment in “capital”) into shapes and forms and places where the resources can be used for the satisfaction of his wants and the advancement of his standard of living. The only way by which man can do this is by the use of his mind and energy to transform resources (“production”) and to exchange these products for products created by others. Man has found that, through the process of voluntary, mutual exchange, the productivity and hence, the living standards of all participants in exchange may increase enormously. … He does this, first, by finding natural resources, and then by transforming them (by “mixing his labor” with them, as Locke puts it), to make them his individual property, and then by exchanging this property for the similarly obtained property of others. The social path dictated by the requirements of man’s nature, therefore, is the path of “property rights” and the “free market” of gift or exchange of such rights. Through this path, men have learned how to avoid the “jungle” methods of fighting over scarce resources so that A can only acquire them at the expense of B and, instead, to multiply those resources enormously in peaceful and harmonious production and exchange.

The great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer pointed out that there are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth; one, the above way of production and exchange, he called the “economic means.” The other way is simpler in that it does not require productivity; it is the way of seizure of another’s goods or services by the use of force and violence. This is the method of one-sided confiscation, of theft of the property of others. This is the method which Oppenheimer termed “the political means” to wealth. …The “political means” siphons production off to a parasitic and destructive individual or group; and this siphoning not only subtracts from the number producing, but also lowers the producer’s incentive to produce beyond his own subsistence. …

The State, in the words of Oppenheimer, is the “organization of the political means”; it is the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory.

Given this context, let’s take Carlson’s familial analogy seriously.

As evolutionary biology teaches us, and as biologist Richard Dawkins elucidates in his renowned 1976 book The Selfish Gene, natural selection tends to favor behavioral dispositions that promote an organism’s “inclusive fitness,” meaning the propagation of its genes through both direct reproduction and genetically related offspring. Because biological parents share a substantial portion of their genes with their children, traits that dispose parents to protect and invest in their offspring are strongly selected for across human evolutionary history. This means that parental interests and children’s interests are far more tightly aligned than the interests of unrelated strangers.

Market economics works similarly. The reason that free markets have typically resulted in so much wealth creation is that they exclude parasitic resource acquisition strategies such as violent seizure of wealth, and therefore they incentivize people to offer each other mutually beneficial transactions that all parties involved willingly agree to. This means that in a market context, people serve their own interests by serving those of others. As the founder of modern economics Adam Smith famously writes in his 1776 masterpiece The Wealth Of Nations:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.

Therefore, as we can trust our biological father far more than a stranger to look out for our interests, we can trust associates in the private sector far more than federal government employees to look out for our interests. Our father’s biological interests are to a large degree our biological interests, and our voluntary associates’ economic interests are to a large degree our economic interests.

Of course, associates in the private sector will often rip us off and cheat us if they can, but at least they know that if we catch them doing so (or even never catch them but gradually cease to see a benefit from associating with them) we are free to immediately take our business elsewhere and spread the word of their poor service. Federal government employees, conversely, have enslaved us to the coercive and involuntary institutions of taxation and federal regulation. If we don’t like the “products” provided by them, we may have an opportunity years later to lodge a largely impotent vote in the deeply flawed and corrupted electoral system, but we cannot automatically and easily take our business elsewhere like we can in the private sector.

These largely parasitic expropriators of privately earned resources are highly unaccountable compared to voluntary associates in the private sector, such as those who employ most of us, sell us groceries, and so on. Rather than being compelled to steward resources wisely and benevolently, federal government employees are largely incentivized to enable fraud and loot the treasuries they have temporary access to before the end of their limited term.

Tucker Carlson’s idea that a more loving leadership class will solve America’s problems is like hoping, while being mugged, that the mugger will start loving you and therefore start serving your interests. While it may be nice if that would happen, thinking of it as a serious solution to the problem of being mugged is laughable. Similarly, hoping that US political leadership starts governing well out of love for the strangers who inhabit America’s landmass suggests a deeply misguided assessment of the nature of tax-funded governance.

Instead of longing to be loved by representatives of coercive parasitic institutions, and hoping that they treat us benevolently despite their incentives to the contrary, Carlson and the rest of America’s population would be wise to focus on the love of their families and associates in the private sector, whose interests are much more closely aligned, and who can therefore be relied on in much more robust and valuable relationships.

As for the coercive parasitism, private citizens would be wise to take any opportunity to diminish its influence over family and market life. If representatives of parasitic institutions want to be valued as contributors to human wellbeing, they should have to stop relying on tax dollars and start creating something of value that people demonstrate a willingness to pay for voluntarily.

Infallible or absolute knowledge has never been demonstrated. Some theories are very strong, but even the strongest ones may turn out to be incorrect. As the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon writes in the 6^th century BC (as translated by philosopher Karl Popper in his 1963 book Conjectures and Refutations),

But as for certain truth, no man has known it,
Nor will he know it; neither of the gods,
Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.
And even if by chance he were to utter
The final truth, he would himself not know it:
For all is but a woven web of guesses.

Does this mean there is a limit on what can be achieved through science and human inquiry? In a narrow sense, yes: The pursuit of truth can probably never produce absolute and infallible knowledge. But in a much broader and more important sense, it means quite the opposite: Since there is no final conclusion of the project of better understanding the world, the scope and scale of knowledge can increase unboundedly.

As Popper writes,

But is there any danger that our need to progress will go unsatisfied, and that the growth of scientific knowledge will come to an end? In particular, is there any danger that the advance of science will come to an end because science has completed its task? I hardly think so, thanks to the infinity of our ignorance.

Some people conflate fallibilism with extreme skepticism. While fallibilism admits that knowledge is tentative and incomplete, skepticism in its most extreme form denies the existence of real knowledge altogether. These two views are incompatible and must not be conflated. In his 1993 book Kindly Inquisitors, Jonathan Rauch explains the distinction well:

In its most peculiar and extreme philosophical form, skepticism refers to the doctrine that we have no reason to believe anything, and so should believe nothing. That, however, is on its face an unsustainable argument. Believing nothing is impossible. Even the belief that you are justified in believing nothing is a belief. And even when we refuse to conclude, we do so only against the background of other conclusions. No one could possibly be a genuinely beliefless skeptic, even in principle.

The “skepticism” upon which liberal science is based is something quite different. (To distinguish it from the kind which says that we should never conclude anything, philosophers often call it “fallibilism.”) This kind of skepticism says cheerfully that we have to draw conclusions, but that we may regard none of our conclusions as being beyond any further scrutiny or change. … This attitude does not require you to renounce knowledge. It requires you only to renounce certainty, which is not the same thing.

The tentative, fallible knowledge that humans can create is far from illusory. Despite its incompleteness, it has enabled humans to live in outer space, split atomic nuclei, double human life expectancy, and achieve countless other feats that people from pre-scientific civilization would have found miraculous.

And thanks to the infinity of human ignorance, given the real tools of inquiry and discovery that can be deployed, infinitely more can yet be achieved.

Under any form of governmental rule, including a democracy, the “ruling class” (politicians and civil servants) represents only a small proportion of the total population. While it is possible that one hundred parasites may lead a comfortable life on the products of one thousand hosts, one thousand parasites cannot live off of one hundred hosts.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed

Free markets are the path to long-term economic growth. And economic growth isn’t just good for Wall Street—it enables ordinary people to access more of virtually everything they care about, such as nutrition, medical care, safety, education, better job opportunities, and the rest of what constitutes material prosperity.

Moderate defenders of free markets are happy to acknowledge this for many purposes. For example, they understand that food was more widely available in the United States than in the Soviet Union because the Soviet communists interfered more with market forces on food production than US capitalists did. But moderate defenders of free markets, and people who are entirely against free markets, often doubt whether pure free markets would be a good idea.

While many societies on Earth today contain significant free-market elements, none of them are pure free markets, or purely any other one system of political economy. They have elements of free-market capitalism mixed in with some socialist policies, and so on. Pure free markets would entail radical reforms such as the complete elimination of taxation, since taxation is an involuntary forfeiture of private assets and therefore constitutes a violation of the private property rights that define the free market capitalist system. Radical libertarian economist Murray Rothbard proposed a “non-aggression principle” whereby “no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else,” except in defense against those who have already initiated such aggression. This standard, constantly breached to a greater or lesser extent by every national government currently existing on Earth, is essentially what a society would have to uphold in order to count as a fully free market.

Critics of radical freedom and private property rights often ask: “If pure free markets would work so well, why don’t we see any national-scale examples in the real world?” It is a valid question. If reducing taxation and other infringements on private property rights to zero could make an economy vastly wealthier, as is the prediction of radical capitalists such as myself, wouldn’t we see at least one country take advantage of this opportunity?

The Direction of Causality Between Wealth and Parasitic Governance

One tempting answer is that taxation and other rights-violating institutions must somehow contribute to prosperity, since they are present in all wealthy societies. But this inference is not as strong as many assume it to be. As George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan has suggested, “Perhaps rich societies have big governments because it takes a colossal host to sustain colossal parasitism.”

Similarly, all healthy adult elephants have parasites but that doesn’t mean the parasites are making them healthier. The fact that parasitic institutions can persist does not mean they are beneficial any more than the presence of parasites on a healthy organism implies that the parasites are helping it. It simply means that the cost of eliminating such institutions is high, and that they are able to sustain themselves on the surplus generated by productive activity.

Instead of tax-collection enabling governance that makes societies rich, it is plausible that wealth generated through voluntary exchange creates an attractive target for political extraction. The presence of large governments in wealthy societies may reflect not their necessity, but their ability to feed on existing prosperity without immediately destroying it. This is a plausible explanation for why we do not observe national-scale pure free markets, even if government infringements on free market principles hinder rather than aid human wellbeing.

Historically, states have emerged not as the result of careful institutional design aimed at maximizing prosperity, but through conquest, coercion, and the gradual development of ideological justifications for rule. Once established, they persist by extracting resources from productive populations, often while convincing those populations of their legitimacy or necessity.

Prospects for the Future of Free Markets

Even if tax-funded institutions are merely parasitic, that doesn’t mean they’re all equally detrimental to human flourishing. Some are far less destructive than others, partly due to institutional tendencies toward self-restraint that some exhibit far more than others. Institutional self-constraints can raise the cost of coercion and lower the tolerance for rights violations, thereby reducing the scale of parasitism even if they do not eliminate it entirely.

For example, the First and Second Amendments of the United States Constitution make it harder for members of the federal government to infringe upon the speech, property, and association of US citizens. Though US statists still sometimes get away with it, the added cost of having to face constitutional backlash for infringements on free speech reduces such infringements at the margins. Even if marginal, such institutional constraints enable higher levels of innovation, productivity, and material prosperity than would exist under less scrupulous parasitic institutions.

Just because there has never been a national-scale experiment in pure free markets doesn’t mean that one can’t exist in the future. Slavery was omnipresent in every major society throughout most of recorded history, but in the post-Enlightenment world it was abolished in most societies thanks largely to conscious efforts beginning in Britain and other parts of the Western world. This happened extremely quickly relative to the grand sweep of human history. In the United States just a few years before the Civil War, abolition was widely considered extremely unlikely (when it was considered at all) and abolitionists were seen as fringe radicals. The institutionalized mass theft known as taxation could similarly fall away and become largely unthinkable to advanced societies.

But even if taxation and other widespread parasitic policies are never abolished, diminishing them at the margins is feasible and meaningful. By analogy, the idea of completely eliminating murder or rape from a society is unrealistic, but we do not conclude from this that efforts to reduce them are worthless or futile. Social norms, legal institutions, and cultural attitudes can significantly reduce the prevalence of such behaviors, even if they cannot eliminate them entirely.

Parasitic institutions such as taxation may likewise be difficult to eliminate completely, but they can be constrained, reduced, and delegitimized over time. And to the extent that this occurs, societies can move closer to a system of fully voluntary exchange, with corresponding marginal but meaningful gains in prosperity and human flourishing.