🚼 America's worst public intellectual, RIP

How Paul Ehrlich’s population panic helped shape a half-century of pessimism about technology, growth, and humanity's future on Earth

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in the USA and around the world:

First, imagine if each broadcast of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon attracted a full-magnitude larger audience—maybe maybe 10 or 15 million each night rather than 1.0 to 1.5 million.

Second, imagine if once or twice a year for the next decade, Fallon engaged in a serious chat with Eliezer Yudkowsky, perhaps the most prominent evangelist for the view that artificial intelligence poses an existential threat to humanity. Whether that steady exposure to a normie audience would materially shift public attitudes to the risks of AI is hard to say. But it would be unlikely to make the technology’s advocates, such as me, sleep easier.

The real-world version of that Down Wing thought experiment starred Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University ecologist whose bestselling book The Population Bomb, co-authored with wife and colleague Anne Howland Ehrlich, warned of imminent famine and civilizational decline. Its infamous opening line declared the battle to feed humanity already lost! Between 1968 and 1981, Ehrlich made some 20 appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, repeating his catastrophic thesis to an audience of millions of regular Americans. No Baby Boomer or Gen Xer doubts the influence of Ehrlich, who died Friday, age 93.