Part 15/19:
Drawing a parallel, the speaker discusses the exponential growth of the human population. Since the late 20th century, world population has surged from roughly 5 billion to over 8 billion, adding three billion people in just a few decades. This growth bucked traditional, localistic thinking habits because humans are evolutionarily wired to interpret the world hierarchically and locally, not exponentially or globally.
This lack of intuitive understanding of exponential phenomena hampers our ability to grasp the trajectory and implications of AI development and planetary limits. Our evolution did not prepare us for global, exponential change, making it difficult to understand how rapidly these trends could accelerate.