problems we are having with the gun issue so the bill needs to be passed and they did not pass it at this time it was too expensive. so i would like to see that happen we will solve all of the problems of the teachers and the schools. >> good evening ladies and gentlemen stephen pinker is a

professor of psychology at harvard university and a two-time for the surprise finalist and award for many of his books for research named 100 most influential people in the world today. with 100 global thinkers. and enlightenment now bill gates says the world is getting better even though it doesn't feel that way i'm glad there's places like stephen. her not only the best book pinker has ever written it is my favorite book of all time. please join mee to welcome stephen pinker.

[applause] >> thank you very much how many times we ask deep and difficult questions how do we make this better? hardly gave meaning and purpose to our lives? many people have answers and is dictated by god in holy scriptures it is the fault of evil people who must be shamed and punished and defeated. or to claim the rightful greatness with a strong leader or in the past order and harmony until forces come on

the generation to restore the society. what about the rest of us? i argue there is an alternative system of beliefs and values with the ideals of the enlightenment to use knowledge many people embrace that and the need to describe them and the status quo of the ottablishmentp other ideologies have passionate advocates and i suggest this also needs a positive defense that is what i have have tried to do. the ideals of the enlightenment i suggest captured in four key ideas science reason humanism and progress. it all beginsil with reason with

the realization traditional sources are generators of delusion revelation tradition authority charisma to schism intuition sacred text and in contrast what is nonnegotiable to view provide reasons for anything other than reason if you try to suggest you are right and other people should believe you that you are not lying or full of crab that you lost the argument then you appeal to reason. humans on their own or not reasonable most notably some psychologists have shown human beings are likely to generalize with anecdotes and

from stereotypes to seek evidence that confirms our belief and blow off evidence that this confirms that and we are overconfident of our knowledge a of wisdom and rectitude. however, people are capable of reason if they establish certain norms and institutions like free speech anyone can criticize the claims of anyone else the debat debate, logical analysis, fact checking and empirical testing bringing me to the second, science. science is based on the conviction we can understand the world by formulating explanations and testing against reality. showing to be the most reliable way of understanding including ourselves that there can be a science of human

nature just like any other beliefs in the world. science believes not just the technical know-how but fundamental insights and naturalism the universe has no purpose related to human welfarehe with the implication if we want to improve that welfare we have to do it ourselves. but in a closed system disorder increases things fall apart and stuff happens there are vastly more ways for things to go wrong then right and evolution, humans are competitivere which selects for reproductive success out of the crooked timber of humanity can no straight things be

built. the third and alignment theme of humanism is to reduce the suffering and enhance the flourishing of human beings and creatures that sounds honest the alternative moral systems prioritize other things such as the ultimate good is to enhance the nation the race or the class and to obey the dictates of divinity pressuring others to do the same, achieve feats of heroic greatness or a mystical force struggle or a pursuit of the messianic age. humanism is feasible because humans are endowed with a sense of sympathy recurring enlightenmentt to be concerned with the welfare of others by

default our circle of sympathy is we only tend to sympathize with relatives or close friends and allies or cute little fuzzy baby animals and that's it but to be expanded through the forces of possible politician education, journalism, art, mobility and reason i cannot insist my interestts are special just because i hope you to take me seriously we are engaged in discourseor to expand the circle of sympathy at ideal is progress to reduce suffering and we can gradually succeed. how can progress be possible it is possible through the

norms and institutions by which we deploy energy and knowledge and magnify the better angels of nature such as reason and sympathy to marginalize the bias and tribalism and dominance examples of enlightenment institutionsnt democracy, declarations of rights, organizations for global cooperation and institutions of truth seeking with society and a free press. how did that alignment thing work out? if you ask most intellectuals the answer is not very well. most hate progress and if they called himself progressive

they really hate progress i am told that we have a blind faith and religious belief in the superstition of the false promise of another double progress you are a cheerleader for full girl american hinduism with the spirit of boardroom ideology telecom valley and the chamber of commerce practitioners of history optimist and the illusion to it was declared all this the best from all possible worlds of trust to be categorized as a pessimist we think we could do much better definitely this is not the best of all possible worlds but it should not depend on an

attitude or temperament or sunny disposition but be treated as a hypothesis it can be measured life, health, sustenance, prosperity safety, knowledge pleasure, happiness over time that is progress with my book i try to make the case with graphs plotting measures of human well-being over time i feel naked telling the story without graphs behind me i will have to do description and pantomime to conveysc my points but the most precious resource is life itself and through most of human history life expectancy was around 30 years but thanks to vaccinations and sanitation antibiotics andon other advances

life expectancy in the developed world is greater than 80 years and the world as a whole is 71 years so the biggest hit to thehe human lifespan has been childhood mortality even in a country as wealthy and advanced as sweden 200 years ago one third one -- one third of children didn't make it to their fifth birthday but today in the poorest parts of the world 6% of children fail to make it sub-saharan countries like ethiopia adjust last in the 40 years brought their rate down from 25% to 6%. still too high but the improvement is continuing.

and infant mortality street sweden 1% of mothers died in childbirth now that has been brought down to one third of 1% in the poorest countries and with most of the measures of well-being are depicted in the graft but t the general pattern measure after measure is before the alignment pretty much p everyone was wretched. poverty and hunger and early death european and american countries was the great escape from universal poverty followed recently by asia, southern asia and sub-saharan africa. health. someone who has spent a good chunk of his career the winner

of past tense i can identify my favorite past tense sentence in the history of the language coming from a wikipedia entry for smallpox and it says smallpox was a disease designed by two viruses but the definition is in the past tense because killing 300 trillion people in the 20th century alone ceases too exist similar progress has been made although not similar yet like folio even diseases that will not be extinguish our all coming down in mortality rates gonorrhea and measles and diarrhea and aids. and starting with the agricultural revolution in the 18 century of other advances

and fertilizers in the mechanization of farming and selective breeding thought to have saved 1 billion lives the number of calories available has increased in every part of the world including sub-saharan africa and this is a dubious form of progress if it was just making fat peoplete fatter but in 194750% of the world that the definition of undernourishment 43% 1870 and has come down every part of the world to be effectively zero also in latin america and asia and sub-saharan africa. as a result, canada one of the

horsemen of the apocalypse striking without warning was pretty much vanished expect for the most war-torn corners of the world. prosperity for both of human history economic growth was pretty much nonexistent a tiny increase until the industrial revolution the 18th century which initiated a blastoff of exponential growth with product increasing two hundredfold the last 250 years. once again this was uneven to begin with europe and the americas thanks to the growth of education and technology and institutions to foster commerce but again a dubious achievement but poverty

defined as the amount feed oneself and one's family that 200 years ago 90% of the world population fit the definition of extreme poverty that has now fallen to less than 10% united nation says the elimination of extreme poverty by the 2030s and we all hope to see that day. as a result of the decimation of extreme poverty globally quality has been decreasing it is inevitable with the investor revolution and wealth that increased because before

the investor revolution everyone lived in squalor and poverty but with the discovery of new sources of wealth from industrialization on people escaped from extreme poverty leaving others behind so increasing global equality but more recently because of globalization and trade and the market, poor countries are getting richer quicker than rich countries are getting richer and the deficit is decreasing. within wealthy countries inequality is increasing but it's not so much the gap but the situation not so much if they have the same but if they have enough in the revolution seldom appreciated a massive expansion to social spending

that is reallocation of wealth to the poor, the sick, the young and old to every developed country even with the name of wagner's love through most of history devoting 1% of gdp to social spending and today the median is 22% of social spending even a country like united states that allocates 19% of of gdp to social transfers. so while inequality has increased quality has not so by the measure of disposable income the poverty rate has fallen by one measure of 30% and if measured by consumption by what people can afford then

it is less than 3% today. so for history war is the state of international relations and i have a graph from a previous book which shows the percentage of years the major states and empires were at each other's throats and it goes from about 100% to 16 century there hasn't been a great power war pitting them against each other since united states was against china 60 years ago. if we zoom in the postwar period that era of development

the global rate of warfare is pneumatically decreasing through the era of the korean war 300,000 died per year but then five in the 80s during the iran-iraq war but today even the worst war in a generation with the civil war it is 1.2. with the signing of the peace agreement through columbia the last war in the western hemisphere came to an end in which an entire hemisphere is that more and 56 of the the world surface is free of war. despite obvious backsliding of

turkey and russia and china the overall trend toward democracy has not been reversed the world has never been more democratic but in 1971 the world had 31 democracies half of europe was behind the iron curtain even western europe aim and portugal have fascist dictatorships. blend khmer loan -- latin america, taiwan, south korea they all become democratic today 103 countries were two thirds of the world's countries in the population. the power of the government to brutalize their citizens

capital punishment has been abolished in country after country but if you extrapolate the line for capital punishment it will vanish from the face of the earth in about ten years. in country after country homosexuality has been normalized to use to a criminal offense in almost every country every year and a couple more countries decriminalize homosexuality and with child labor england mid- 19th century in oliver twist one third of the children report to work and farms and factories put a premium on education and the increased evaluation that went down pretty close to zero now it is replicated in the world as a whole.

in 1850 putting the children to work now it is 10% and continues to fall. winning the nobel peace prize for his efforts be hugely successful to bring down the rates of child labor. violent crime. in the homicide statistics going back to the middle ages in the 14th century the homicide rate england and netherlands 45 per 100,000 per year thanks to the frontier regions brought under control under the rule of law. anarchy and vendetta replaced by criminal justice system that rate has fallen about one per 100,000 per year and 35 fold reduction in what seems

to be replicated the same thing happens in new england with the anarchy of the frontier the same thing happened in the american wild last through the cowboy movies and even parts of the world that are notorious for violence like mexico have had a fivefold reduction compared to the 30s. along with many other areas of human flourishing so with that human flourishing he fall behind the democratic peers ten times that of european countries and the rate has

fallen by more than half it isn't just the most extreme crime but the rate of rape has fallen some new 5% since the 70s, domestic violent has plummeted and victimization of children in the schoolyard's are in the home physical abuse, sexual abuse have all gone down. indeed we are safer in just about every other way you can imagine thanks to advances in the design of automobiles and highways of licensing requirements or traffic law enforcement we are 96% less likely to die in a car crash compared to the early 20th century with 80% less likely from the sidewalk or a plane

crash or fall pushed to her just 92% less likely less likely to be burned to death 90% less likely to drown or to be succeeded but there is one exception if i could show you the graph you would see a bunch of curves going down but one goes up the category called death by poison or solid or liquid so i wondered why they were suddenly drinking bleach but it turns out it includes drug overdoses in the opioid ambit -- epidemic that has gone dramatically in the wrong direction. 95% less likely to be killed on the job far less likely to be killed in an act of god of

a brush fire or earthquake or volcano or flood or famine. what about the asset side for the favorite metaphor for the date with death? the thunderbolt by zeus? yes we are 96% less likely to die of lightning strike and most of european history 15% of the population how to read or write the in the world as a whole the literacy rate has exceeded 80% for people under the age of 25 not just true for boys but also for girls gender parity and basic education and perhaps the most

incredible example that i have come across, we are getting smarter it is called the flynn effect by three points a decade by almost a century mostly to the spread of education because of the rise of public health and with symbols and abstract concepts into every daily one -- life trickling down from science and academia and technology. so all these things that economists like to measure and quantify so yes, for example charles dickens reminded us in a christmas carol in the 19 century they work 65 hours a

week followed by 22 hours per week and now most workers get three weeks of paid vacation that adds to the reduced workweek. we used to spend hours a week on housework that really means women but thanks to electricity and running water and devices like refrigerators or vacuum cleaners dishwashers and soap have the amount of time has fallen to about 15 hours per week and an entire day of one's life used to be called washday to wash clothes.

the work we housework he received the graph you would see one anomaly then has steadily increased through the '90s and then has a lot for women. but women spend more time today with their children a single working mother today spends four hours per week with her children than a married stay-at-home on in the 50s. forget leave it to beaver. we also spend less paycheck on necessities in 1920 had to fork over more than 60% of their paycheck for clothing and shelter now it is one third. does any of this make any difference for our happiness? it does.

and the majority of countries that we have longitudinal data to track this overtime there is an increase in united states is an exception happiness has stagnated although it has gotten worse and more generally to look at the effect of economic development the full range from poor countries, then we see there is a very strong relationship between per capita and happiness so as the world gets richer people get happier. it has happened at the expense of the environment but in the development that few people appreciate the environment is rebounding and to the state of the environment environmental

progress environment of quality in the last several decades. including the united states the environmental protection act the number of miles that we drive every year has gone up the population is gone up at the same pollute on -- pollution has gone down and the hard libertarian right to have environmental growth or economic growth have those falsely has environmental regulations intemperate to the world deforestation has basically fallen 20 has farms

are abandoned reclaimed by forest even tropical forest where there is still a lot of deforestation the amount of deforestation has and his family down not at zero but the production has narrowed. as the world shifts or oil by the fewer and fewer oil spills and more and more of the earth surface are now protected against economic exploitation of the oceans. and what you call human progress how is this reflected in the news? another graph i have to pantomime data scientists use a technique that automatically

analyzes for degree of positivity of positive words and negative words it shows the new york times becomes more barroso overtime with a sample of the sources shows the same increasing gloom. why do people deny progress? coming from the interactions between cognition first to be identified that the human brain to assess probability and the easier it is to recall examples and images and anecdotes and narratives the more likely we think it is. so news is about the stuff that happens you never see a

reporter that says i porting my poor school that shot up but the number has not fallen 20 but to report on the news we combine that with the availability to get the impression the world is getting more dangerous and always has been. there are other psychological reports that i think inflate our sense of doom sometimes called the negativity bias dread losses more than we favor gains worry about the threats we appreciate improvements lead only not that says since the world is a dangerous place that

professional imagines and profits you remind us that indeed this sets up a prophecy market where the most morose profits are the ones that we record the greatest seriousness and sounds like they are trying to help you the optimist sounded they're trying to tell you something so i will conclude with three general questions about progress and alignment. isn't it good to be pessimistic? and speak truth to power? it is up to a point but really to be accurate where one -- aware of the injustice of but also to be reduced.

there are dangers why waste time and money on a hopeless cause to alleviate poverty in the developing world? precisely that conviction that gives us confidence to solve the problems that remain also that if the institution is failing society spirals downward power a leader to help bring would be better than what we have now could be a history kind of desperation

with the can't get any worse is very wrong even with the problems that remain. to think it is inevitable of course not there is no magical arc leaning towards justice or rising human improvement but quite the contrary the laws of the universe are left to their own devices getting worse, not better solutions create new problems and we could be blindsided and it does happen micro borders in 1969 film and opioid epidemic. also there are global

challenges we have not yet solved prominent is climate change and the threat of nuclear war that is possibly catastrophic that these are solvable climate change must be addressed with carbon taxes and pricing and eventually negative carbon technology denuclearization to be pursued by stability and tumor graphs so with these endeavors but

with gdp may find that britain for example that had huge carbon emissions relying on wood and coal left now switching to oil and gas and nuclear united states follows the same curve china has repeated that trajectory so industrialization is not committed to flaming carbon that is a process that is done it has to be brought to zero but to be suggested it is not possible that people are aware has been reduced by 85% the height of the cold war 2% of american energy county commission soviet weapons and

that does need to be brought to zero but don't we go against nature defenders of religion or nationalism and the conquest of disease poverty violence and ignorance people need to believe us drunk chief to protect the tribe. and to be the happiest and healthiest place on earth probably in the history of our species and a top destination of the people who vote with their feet and to apply

knowledge and sympathy is heroic and i daresay spiritual. thank you very much. [applause] >> we have time for questions. raise your hand. >> i have a lot of admiration as a public intellectual i will not argue with your statistics on human history but i think optimism is rational to say a good way to figure out how long it will last but mike meant with civilization is only a couple hundred years old so looking

at the curve of gdp it feels like it is going against that gradient so do you think it is a local maximum that uncertainty of climate change or artificial intelligence is off? been there is no law of physics or the universe that says gdp growth has to level off or stop you get more and more human benefit the smart phone has replaced 50 appliances wealthy countries have we piqued stuff we consume less timber and every resource but life keeps getting more interesting

because we are on our self from that is a myth that will level off but solve the problem maybe we will but with there is no law of physics as we cannot called for the problem meeting with political action plenty of those that hit the surface there is plenty of opportunities from world energy even with exponential growth in the long run running into a red giant we will die so undoubtably there is a maxim in the span of hundreds or millions of millennia there could be.

you can't say there isn't but none of the arguments are in they think the threat of runaway artificial intelligence i do discuss that in the book is fanciful kind of like y2k if you remember how nuclear missiles were going to launch from the silos and fall from the sky? your power plants with meltdown? i do that threat of artificial intelligence but that is different from nuclear war or climate change that is more serious that is solvable. >> thanks for coming today a great talk. if the mainstream media is negative is that a trade-off to be happy if we are informed

? >> yes there is something of a trade-off i do discuss that. one of the reasons effect given the rising fortune of america, why is happiness stagnated and the americans that call themselves extremely happy as we become more aware of the rules problems as we become more mature we have to pay the rent and put food on the table now we are worried about a couple generations and not worry about like in the 1950s the peak of the influence, people didn't worry about racial equality or nuclear war or the atomic café.

housewives had missed a class, poverty as a whole more aware of poverty and environmental degradation and environmental degradation we may add to our personal worry list even though nothing whatsoever they can do about it but i do think there is something of a trade-off in one of these challenges is to take the world's problems seriously without worrying ourselves to death. to be mindfulness of expectation or cognitive therapy or armored vehicles it is a challenge we face as we

become the church citizens. >> i was wondering what caused the enlightenment? long time ago civilization was relatively new but that made people value science how do you think of those causes? >> but the problem that it only happened once we cannot replay the state to add at the different outcomes but i wish there were predecessors to indictment ideas so here are some possibilities the historical memory of carnage of war in the 15th for 16th

and 17th centuries and people realized horrific results happen when you take your belief to seriously. the scientific revolution showed people that age old convictions could be wrong in that path to understanding could be to make those beliefs tentative. the age of exploration that came into people's consciousness people doing things very different. so they could set back with the cultural anthropologist to appreciate diversity to say the things we have taken for granted maybe a technological development only industry

shows a huge increase in efficiency prior to the industrial revolution was publishing. in the 18th century the cost of printing a book distributing it plunged at the same time literacy surprise -- surpassed the 50% mark and pamphlets and treatises in the manifesto that meant they would proliferate in a matter of weeks so there is a huge exchange of ideas and with that of people became more mobile easier to be not as easy to be persecuted you can hop on a ship to go to amsterdam or london. many were persecuted instead of beheaded they went

somewhere else so mobility also played a role. >> i really enjoyed the book and this talk. on the topic of artificial intelligence you suggest in the book the way to deal with the risk of super intelligence is just don't build one. it seems like intelligent people who are concerned about the risk that it will be tamperproof by design but unattended given the potential for good and profit do you think it is realistic to expect not building one is a possibility?

and with that chapter of existential threats so asking gets harder to have primate psychology as computers get smaller they want to control more resources that may be and then to displace us and then with those fatal experiments or we say increased happiness with the picture of a smile

putting smiley faces into the universe so these scenarios are self feuding and they assume that people will be so brilliant we will design artificial intelligence with the power to cure cancer but so stupid it will give us control all over society without thinking what could possibly go wrong? in intelligence itself is so brilliant it could come up with a cure to cancer is so idiotic to interpret us so literally it would kill us all in the process. even some of the people from artificial intelligence a y

and z building self driving cars isn't he worried they will take the go on a straight line and vote people down? he's not worried about that. he would fill the car that would accept a command like that likewise first of all we don't get every control over every molecule so the idea that intelligence takes off on this process falls victim to the current height that it is always subject to and for all their successes it is wide spread understanding of that research and also the scenarios confuse intelligence

with the hypothetical entity that knows the position and velocity of every molecule in the universe and will predict what will happen through sheer computation. that is impossible for a variety of recent but if interacting with the world by trial and error there is always a limitation how smart you can get based on the body that is and the real world adams so the idea to take off fast to control that in the actual nature of intelligence that single woman in question.

>> i don't think a single woman has asked a question. >> i feel like a lot of us say that's great what about this? talk about increasing intelligence and dimension it has started to slow down. could that reverse? with intelligence with the children to be correlated? >> yes. things that can't go on forever don't. it has leveled off in those countries that it has gone on the longest. . . . .

to put its innate intelligence and the percentage of people in asia and africa the top 1% has not gone to graduate school but it probably will in the next several decades as the trend towards education continues. they are putting a massive recruitment under the great power across the globe in the media pursue scenario. >> i'm thank you for the talk. my question for you is in a relationship to your finding of the happiness factor being leveled off or snag states and

the cdc 2016 causes of death and the 2015 morbidity all correlate to what seems to be the stress that your ways of bruce mcewen's work with the stress cycle and how he perceives and because of our negativity that we are always looking for worst-case scenarios and the earth institute and united nations and the sustainable happiness what is the happiness that are in the world factors that were identified or positive a motion resilience mindfulness and prosocial a motion.

>> those are number one and number two. social trust, lack of corruption >> yes, so the things regarding the news that again towards the negativity factor because it's more the assumption that it is a common factor for us. >> indeed and i should emphasize the progress does not mean everything gets better for everyone always. that is science driven problem-solving ended eight the day in the united states of glass fiber 10 years there's every bit of aggression in the sector of the population, namely concentrated in less educated more rural baby boomer white men where life expectancy is gone

down, suicide is gone up. there are enough of them that is brought down the light expectancy for the country as a whole and to find a pattern of the rest of the world. this is an example of how there can be local reversals of progress and indeed stress might be contributor. their negative health effects of stress because they are concentrated areas where there've been unemployment and underemployment although it could also be more direct with health care and health that is it. some of it is self and lifted because of the availability of opioids. some of it is driven by a suicide so this is unmistakably a reversal of progress in certain sectors of the united states and one that is too addressed as example of how progress doesn't happen by itself.

>> i think it's time for the signing unless you have any final comments. [applause] give a round of applause