marshall's efforts to end the 1945 chinese civil war in the china mission. look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for many of the authors in the near future on booktv on c-span2. [inaudible conversations] >> good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to barnes & noble upper west side. steven pinker is a harvard college professor of psychology at harvard university. a two-time pulitzer prize finalist and the winner of many awards for his research, teaching and books, he has been named one of "time"'s 100 most influential people in the world today. and foreign policy's 100 global thinkers. he brings us tonight his new book, "enlightenment now: the

case for reason, science, humanism and progress." bill gates says, the world is getting better even if it doesn't always feel that way. i'm glad are we have brilliant thinkers like steven pinker to help us see the big picture. "enlightenment now" is not only the best book pinker's ever written, it's my new favorite book of all time. so without further ado, please join me in welcoming steven pinker. [applause] >> thank you very much. from time to time, we all can some deep and difficult questions. why is the world filled with woe? how can we make it better? how do we give meaning and purpose to our lives? well, as difficult as these questions are, many people have answers to them.

for example, some people believe that morality is dictated by god in holy scriptures. when everyone obeys his laws, the world will be perfect. or problems are the fault of evil people who must be shamed, punished and defeated. or our tribe should claim its rightful greatness under the control of a strong leader who embodies its authentic virtue. or in the past we lived in a state of order and harmony until be alien forces brought on tech dense and degeneration. we must restore the society to its golden age. well, what about the rest of us? in "enlightenment now," i argue that there is an alternative system of beliefs and values; namely, the ideals of the enlightenment. we can use knowledge to enhance human flourishing. many people embrace the ideals of the enlightenment without being able to name or describe

them. they've faded into the background as the status quo or the establishment. other ideologies have passionate advocates, and i suggest that enlightenment ideals too need a positive defense and an explicit commitment. and that is what i've tried to do. the yules of the -- ideals of the enenlightenment can be captured in reason, science, humanism and progress. let me say a few words about each. it all begins with reason. with the realization that traditional sources of belief are generators of delusion; faith, revelation, tradition, authority, charisma, mysticism, intuition, the parsing of sacred texts are always of being wrong. are all ways of being wrong. as soon as you try to provide reasons why we should trust

anything other than reason, as soon as you try to suggest that you are right, that other people should believe you, that you're not lying or full of crap, you've lost the argument because you've appealed to reason. now humans on their own are not particularly reasonable. cognitive psychologists, most notably -- [inaudible] have shown that human beings are likely liable to generalize from anecdotes to reason from stereotypes to we all seek evidence that confirms our beliefs and blow off evidence that disconfirms them. and we're overconfident about our knowledge, our wisdom and our rectitude. however, people are capable of reason if they establish certain norms and institutions such as free speech. anyone can criticize the claims of anyone else.

open criticism and debate, optical analysis and empirical testing which brings me to the second of the ideals, science. science is based on the conviction that the world is intelligible, that we can understand the world by formulating possible explanations and testing them against reality. science has shown itself to be the most reliable way of understanding the world including ourselves, an important enlightenment ideal is there can be a science of human nature and that beliefs about society are testable just like any other beliefs about the world. science provides not just technical know how and handy gadgets, but fundamental insights about the human condition. naturalism, the universe has no goal or purpose related to human welfare. with the implication that if we want to improve that welfare, we've got to figure out how to

do it ourselves. entropy. in a closed system, one without unput of energy -- input of energy, disorder increases. things fall apart, stuff happens. and that's because there are vastly more ways more things to go wrong than to go right. evolution. humans are products of a competitive process which selects for reproductive success, not for well-being. as cont put it, a crooked timber of humanity, no truly straight thing can be built. this leads to the third enlightenment theme, humanism, that the ultimate moral purpose is to reduce suffering and enhance the flourishing of human beings and other creatures. now, that sounds pretty obvious. who could be against human flourishing? and the answer is there are lots of alternative moral systems that prioritize other things such as that the ultimate good is to enhance the glory of the tribe, the nation, the race, the

class or the faith, to obey the dictates of a divinity and pressure others to do the same, to achieve feats of heroic greatness or to advance some mystical force, dialectic struggle or pursuit of a utopian or messianic age. humanism is feasible because humans are endowed with a sense of sympathy, another recurring enlightenment theme. that is, we can be concerned with the welfare of others. we feel others' pain. by default, our circling of sympathy is rather puny. we tend to sympathize only with genetic relatives, with close friends and and allies, with cute little fuzzy baby animals, and that's about it. but our sense of sympathy can be expanded through the forces of cosmopolitanism, through education, journalism, art, mobility and reason. i can't insist that my interests

are special just because i'm me and you're not and hope for you to take me seriously. so when we're engaged in discourse, that forces us to expand our circle of sympathy to include others. the final enlightenment ideal is progress, that if we apply knowledge and sympathy to reduce suffering and enhance flourishing, we can gradually succeed. now, if human nature doesn't change, how could progress be possible? and an important answer from the enlightenment is it's possible through benevolent norms and institutions. by which we can deploy energy and knowledge to combat entropy, we can magnify the better angels of our nature such as reason and sympathy while marginalizing our inner demons, our biases, our illusions, our tribalism, our dominance, our vengeance. examples of enlightenment

institutions, brain children of the enlightenment, are democracy, declarations of rights, markets, organizations for global cooperation and institutions of truth-seeking such as academies, scientific societies and a free press. so how did that enlightenment thing work out? is well, if you ask most intellectuals, the answer is not very well. because i have learned that most intellectuals hate progress. and intellectuals who call themselves progressive really hate progress. [laughter] if you think we can solve problems, i have been toll, then you have a blind faith and a quasi-religious belief in the outmoded superstition of the false promise of the myth of the onward march of inevitable progress. you are a cheerleader for vulgar american can-doism with the rah-rah spirit of boardroom

ideology, silicon valley and the chamber of commerce. you are a practitioner of whig history, a naive optimist, a pollyanna and, of course, an allusion to the voltaire character who declared all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. now, by today's standards that would be categorized as a pessimist, because a real optimist would think that we can do much better than the world we find today. this is definitely not the best of all possible worlds. but the case for progress should not depend on an attitude, a temperament, whether you have a sunny be disposition. it can be treated as an empirical hypothesis. human well-being can be measured. we can measure life, health, sustenance, prosperity, peace, freedom, safety, knowledge, leisure, happiness. i submit if they had increased over time, that is progress. now, in "enlightenment now," i

try to make the case with graphs plotting measures of human well-being over time because of the constraints of this room, i -- although i feel naked telling this story without graphs behind me, i'll have to do a combination of verbal description and pantomime to convey the same point. well, let's begin with the most precious resource of all, life itself. through most of human history, life expectancy at birth was around 30 years. but thanks to vaccination, sanitation, antibiotics and other advances in health and medicine, life expectancy at birth today in the developed world is greater than 80 years, and in the world as a whole 71 years. virtually no one guesses that it is that high. through most of history the biggest hit to human life span has been child mortality. indeed, even in a country as wealthy and advanced as sweden

200 years ago about one-third of children did not make it to their fifth birthday. today in the poorest parts of the world, no more than 6% of children fail to make it to their fifth birthday. this would be sub-saharan countries like ethiopia which just in the last 40 years have brought their rate of child mortality down from 25% to 6%. still too high, but the improvement is continuing. maternal mortality is another contributor to premature death, and in seed sweden -- sweden 200 years ago 1% of mothers died in childbirth. that has been brought down now to a third of 1% in the poorest countries of the world. and with most of the measures of well-being, unfortunately i can't depict it in graphs, but the general pattern that you see in measure after measure is that before the enlightenment 250

years ago pretty much everyone was wretched. there was universal poverty and hunger and early death. european and american countries were the paris to make the great escape -- were the first to make the great escape from universal poverty and early death followed recently by asia, southern asia and now sub-saharan africa is closing the gap. health. as someone who has spent a good chunk of his career studying the grammar of the past tense in english, i can identify my favorite past tense sentence in the history of the language. and it comes from a wikipedia entry for smallpox. and the entry begins, smallpox was a disease caused by two viruses. yes, the definition is in the past tense because smallpox, which killed some 300 million

people in 20th century alone, has ceased to exist. and similar progress has been made -- well, not quite similar yet, but other diseases are slated for the past tense including polio and guinea worm. and even diseases that will not be extinguished are all coming down in the mortality rates. pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, measles, hiv/aids. sustenance. in starting with the agricultural revolution in britain in the late 18th century with crop rotation, other advances in aagallonny, the membernyization of -- thought to have saved a billion lives and transportation networks, the number of calories available per person has increased in every part of the world including sub-saharan africa and india.

now, this would be a dubious form of progress if all those extra calories were just making fat people fatter. but, in fact, undernourishment is being decimated. in 1947 approximately 50% of the world met the definition of undernourishment. that fell to about 33% in 1970, and it has come down in every part of the world. it's effectively zero in the developed world but also coming down in latin america, asia and sub-saharan africa. as a result, famine -- which was one of the horsemen of the apocalypse which could strike any continent without warning for most of human history -- has pretty much been banished except for the most remote and war-torn corners of the world. prosperity. for most of human history, economic growth pretty much was nonexistent. a tiny little increase until the

industrial revolution in the 18th century which initiated a blastoff of exponential growth with the result that gross product increased about two ton fold in the last 50 years. -- two hundred fold. it began with europe and the americas thanks to the growth of education and technology and institutionals that foster commerce and -- institutions that foster commerce and trade. but again, this would be dubious achievement if it simply made rich people richer again. but in a development that's seldom appreciated, the growth of prosperity is starting to put anen end to extreme poverty. extreme poverty is standardly defined as the minimum amount necessary to feed one's self and one's family. by that criterion, 200 years ago about 90% of the world's population fit the definition of extreme poverty.

that has now fallen to less than 10%, and the united nations has set as one of its sustainable development goals the elimination of extreme poverty everywhere on earth by the 2030s. may we all live to see that day. as a result of the decimation of extreme poverty, global inequality has been decreasing. now, it was, it's inevitable that with the industrial revolution and the first expansion of wealth that inequality must have increased because before the industrial revolution everyone lived in squalid poverty pretty much. when -- with the discovery of new sources of wealth from industrialization, it meant that some people escaped from extreme poverty leaving others behind, therefore, increasing global inequality. but more recently because of globalization and trade and markets, poor countries have been getting richer faster than

rich countries have been getting richer, and the global inequality index has been decreasing. now, of course, within wealthy countries like the united states and britain, inequality has been increasing. but perhaps what's more relevant is not so much the gap between the rich and poor, but the situation of the poor. whether people -- not so much whether everyone has the same, but whether everyone has enough. and in a revolution that is seldom appreciated, there's been a massive expansion in the amount of social spending; that is, reallocation of wealth to the poor, the sick, the young, the old in every developed country. it's even called, even has a name called wagner's law. for most of history, even the wealthiest countries devote perhaps 1% of their gdp to social spending. today the median is 22% of

social spending. even a country like the united states which is behind the western average allocates 19% of its gdp to social transfers. thanks to these social transfers while inequality has increased, poverty has not. by the measure of disposable income, that is, after taxes and transfers the poverty rate in the united states has fallen by one measure from about 30% in 1960 to about 6% today. and if it's measured by consumption, by what people can afford in food and clothing and shelter, the poverty rate today is less than 3%. peace. for most of modern history, war is the natural state of international relations, and peace was a mere interlude between wars. i have a graph from a previous book, "the better angels of our nature: why violence has

declined," which shows the percentage of years that the great powers of the day -- the major states and empires -- were at each other's throats in major wars. and it goes from about 100% in the 16th century to 0% today. there has not been a great power war directly pitting two great powers against each other since the united states faced off against china 60 years ago. if we zoom in on the postwar period, we see that another unheralded development which is with ups and downs the global rate of death in warfare has been dramatically decreasing. during the era of the korean war, 20 per 100,000 people died in war. that went down to about 9 or 10 during the, in the 1960s during the vietnam war. about 5 in the 1980s during the iran/iraq war and the soviet

invasion of afghanistan. today even with the worst war in a generation, the syrian civil war, it's about 1.2. with the signing of the peace agreement between the government of colombia and the farc guerrillas, the last war in the western hemisphere came to an end, so we're living in an era in which an entire hemisphere is free of war. and, indeed, five-sixths of the world's surface is now free of war. freedom and rights. despite obvious black sliding in russia, in turkey, in venezuela and just today in china, the overall trend towards democratization has not been reversed. the world has never been more democratic than it has been in this decade. in 1971 the world only had 31 democracies. half of europe was behind the iron curtain. even in western europe spain and portugal were fascist dictatorships. greece was under the control of

a military junta. most of latin america was under the control of military governments. taiwan, south korea, all dictatorships. today they have all become democratic, and from 31 countries in 1971 today 103 countries are democracies comprising about two-thirds of the world's countries and two-thirds of the world's population. within countries as well, the power of governments to brutalize their citizens has been gradually curtailed. capital punishment, which used to be pretty much universal, has been abolished in country after country. if current trends continue -- they probably won't -- but if you would extrapolate the lines for abolitions of capital punishment, capital punishment will vanish from the face of the earth in about ten years. in another development, in country after country homosexuality has been decriminalizedded. it used to be a criminal offense

in just about every country, and every year another couple of countries decriminalize homosexuality. child labor. in england in the mid 19th century, the era immortalized by dickens in "oliver twist," for example, about a third of the children were put to work in farms and factories. thanks to the premium on education, membernyization of agriculture and increased valuation of the lives of children that went down to pretty close to zero, a trajectory that is now being replicated in the world as a whole. in 1950 also about 30% of the world's children were put to work. today it is now 10% and continuing to fall. kayla won the nobel peace prize a couple of years ago for his efforts, hugely successful in bringing down the rates of child labor. violent crime. in the -- homicide statistics in

many parts of the world go back 800 years to the middle ages. and in the 14th century, the homicide rate many england and netherlands and other european companies was on the order of 35 per 100,000 per year. thanks to the frontier regions being brought under the control of the rule of law and the anarchy and the code of vendetta being replaced by a criminal justice system, that rate has fallen to about 1 per 100,000 a year, a 35-fold reduction. that is a process that seems to be replicated whenever frontier regions are brought under the rule of law. the same thing happened in new england when the anarchy of the frontier fell under the rule of law. same thing happened in the american wild west made famous by the cowboy movies. and even parts of the world that today remain notorious for their high rates of violence like mexico have had a fivefold

reduction compared to the rate of violence in the 1930s. that process has continued in the united states which in rates of violation, as within many other areas of human flourishing, the united states is kind of a backwater when it comes to wealthy democracies. in pretty much every measure of human flourishing, we fall behind our dem crabbing contact peers. democratic peers. most notably our rates of homicide have been five and ten times that of european countries. but even in the united states, the rate of homicide has fallen by more than half in just the last 25 years. it's not just the most extreme crime -- namely homicide -- that has shown reduction, but the rate of rape in the united states has fallen 75% since the 1970s. the rate of domestic violence has plummeted. and the victimization of children in schoolyards, in the home, rates of bullying, rates of physical abuse, rates of

sexual abuse have all gone down. indeed, we have become safer in just about every other way that you can imagine. thanks to advances in the design of automobiles and highways, better licensing requirements, better ask law enforcement we are 96% less likely to die in a car crash compared to the early 20th century. we're 88% less likely to be mowed down on a sidewalk. 99% less likely to die in a plane crash. 59% less likely to fall to our deaths. 92% less likely to be burned to death. 90% less likely to drown. 92% less likely to bees asphyxiated. there's one exception to this trend, and if i were to show you the graph, you'd see a bunch of curves all going down for various accidental causes of death but one of them going up, and that is the category that

public health experts call death by with poison, solid or liquid. at first when i saw that curve, i wondered why people were suddenly drinking bleach or eating rat poison, but it turns out that that is the category that includes drug overdoses, and the opioid epidemic is one category of safety that has gone dramatically in the wrong direction. however, we're 95% less likely to be killed on the job, and we're globally far less likely to be killed in an act of god, in a earthquake, a brush fire, a volcano, a flood, a famine. what about the quintessential act of god? everyone's favorite metaphor for an unpredictable date with death. the literal bolt from the blue, the thunder bolt hurled by zeus. yes, we are 96% press likely to die -- less likely to die from a lightning strike compared to

several decades ago. [laughter] knowledge. through most of european history, no more than 15% of the population knew how to read or write. today that figure is 100% in the developed world. but in the world as a whole the literacy rate has exceeded 80 %, and for people under the age of 25, 90%. this is true not just for boys as was traditional, but for girls. the world is approaching gender parity in literacy and in basic education. and then perhaps the most incredible example of human progress that i have come across, one that still strains most people's credulity, we are getting smarter. in a well replicated effect called the flynn effect, iq scores have been increasing by three points a decade for almost a century thanks mostly to the spread of education, probably also because of the rise of

public health. and probably also the spread of symbols and abstract concepts into everyday life trickling down from science, academia and technology. well, does any of this bring any gains in quality of life? all these things that economists like to measure and quantify. well, by pretty much any definition of quality of life, yes. for example, was charles dickens reminded us in "a christmas carol," in the 19th century people worked about 65 hours a week. that has fallen by 22 hours a week. and most workers today get three weeks of paid vacation in addition to the reduced workweek. in the domestic sphere, we used to spend about 60 hours a week on house work, and by "we," that really means women since house work traditionally and to a large extent today is gendered. but thanks to the ubiquity of

electricity, running water and labor-saving devices like refrigerator, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, dishwashers and stove which a majority of households have including a majority of poor households, the amount of time that we lose to housework has fallen from about 60 hours a week to about 15 hours a week. and, in fact, an entire day of -- a week of one's life, it used to be called wash day, a today in which women did nothing but wash clothes has been returned to our lives. thanks to the reduction in the workweek and to reduction in house work, leisure time has been increasing even since the 1960s, putting aside the gains from the early 20th century. if you were to see the graph, you'd see one anomaly which is that the amount of leisure time for men has steadily increase9. the amount of leisure time for women increased through the early '90s and then kind of leveled off. and the reason is that women

spend more time today with their children. in fact, a single, working mother today spends more hours a week with her children than a married, stay-at-home mom spent in the '50s. so forget "leave it to beaver." we also spend less of our paycheck on necessities. in 1920 people had to fork over more than 60% of their paycheck to food, clothing and shelter. today it's less than a third. well, does any of this make any difference for our happiness? and the answer is, it does. in a majority of countries for which we have longitudinal data that tracks happiness over time there's been an increase. united states, by the way, is an exception. united states' happiness has pretty much stagnated, although it hasn't gotten worse. and more generally, if we step back and look at a the effects of -- at the effects of economic development on happiness, the full range of the scale from poor countries to rich countries, then we see that

there is a very strong but logarithmic relationship between gdp per capita and happiness both across countries and within countries. so as world gets richer, its people on average get happier. well, has this all happened at the expense of the environment? initially it did. but in a development that few people appreciate, the environment is rebounding. and in a kind of report card for the state of the environment done at yale university, the environmental progress index, 78 out of 80 countries have shown an increase in environmental quality in the last several decades. this includes the united states where since the passage of the environmental protection act in 1970 our gdp has gone up. the number of miles that we drive every year has gone up. the amount -- our population has gone up. but the rate of emission of

pollutions at the same time has gone down. so the idea that's popular both among the hard green left and the hard libertarian right that you can have environmental growth or you can have environmental -- sorry, you could have economic growth or environmental protection, but you can't have both is false. we have had both thanks to environmental regulation which, needless to say, are currently under threat. in them por ate parts of the world, deforestation has basically fallen to zero as farms have been abandoned and are reclaimed by forest. even in tropical forests where there's still an alarming amount of deforestation, the amount has peaked and has come way down. we have to bring that to zero, but the direction is downward. as the world has shipped more and more oil by sea, there have been fewer and fewer oil spills. and more and more of the earth's surface, both land surface and

oceans, have -- are now protected against economic exploitation. about 15% of the world's land area and about 12 percent of the world's oceans. well, i've reviewed case after case of what one would have to call human progress. how is this reflected in the news? well, one more graph that again i'm going to have to pantomime because i can't project it. data scientists use a technique of sentiment mapping which automatically analyzes news stories for degree of positivity, positive words and negative words. and what it has shown is that "the new york times" has gotten pretty much more is and more -- more and more morose over time. [laughter] that's not just "the new york times," a sample of the world's news sources shows the same increasing gloominess. so why do people deny progress? one answer comes from an interaction between the nature

of human cognition and the nature of journalism. amos and daniel identified a shortcut that the human brain takes, a rule of thumb by which we assess probability and risk and danger called the availability heuristic. namely, the easier it is to recall examples from memory; images, anecdotes, narratives the more likely we think something is. now think about how the news works. news is about stuff that happens. it's not about stuff that doesn't happen. you never see a reporter saying here i am reporting live from a city that has not been struck by terrorists today. [laughter] or a school that has not been shot up or a country that has been at peace for 40 years. as long as the number of bad events hasn't fallen to zero, there will always be incidents to report on the news. you combine that with the availability sure riskic, and

you -- heuristic, and you get the impression that the world is getting more dangerous and always has been. there are other psychological quirks that i think inflate our sense of dread and doom. a phenomenon sometimes called the negativity bias that bad is stronger than good, we dread losses more than we savor gains. we worry more about threats than we appreciate improvements lead to not only a sense that the world is always a dangerous place, but it kind of opens up a niche for professional curmudgeons and doomsayers and prophets to remind us of threats that we have may have overlooked. indeed, this sets up a kind of perverse prophesy market where the gloomiest, most morose prophets are the ones to which we accord the greatest moral seriousness. as morgan housing, the financial

writer, put it. optimistings sound -- optimists sound like they're trying to sell you something. [laughter] okay. let me conclude with three general questions about progress and enlightenment. one might reasonably ask isn't it good to be pessimistic? isn't it important to rake the muck, flick the comfortable, speak truth to power? well, it is up to a point, but really what's important is to be accurate. that is, to be aware of problems and suffering and injustice where they occur, but also to be aware of ways in which they could be reduced. because there are dangers to thoughtless possess schism. one of them is fatalism. why throw money down a rat hole trying to alleviate poverty in the developing world if the poor will always be with you? it's precisely the conviction that we can improve -- solve problems that gives us the confidence to solve the problems that remain.

also all this pessimism can give rise to radicalism. if every institution is failing, if all our problems are intractable, society is just spiraling downward circling the drain, then we may as well raise the institutions of modernity, smash the machine, drain the swamp, burn the empire to the ground, empower a leader who promises only i can fix it. and out of the hope that anything would be better than what we have now. well, that can be, as history reminds us, that can be a dangerous kind of desperation because the sentiment that things can't get any worse can be wrong, is wrong given how much better things have become even with the problems that remain. second question, is progress inevitable? and the answer is, of course not. there is no magical arc bending toward justice or tide of rising human improvement that will make

things better off all by themselves. quite the contrary. the laws of the universe aren indifferent to -- are indifferent to human well-being, and left to their own devices things get worse, not better. solutions create new problems which have to be solved in their turn, and we can always be blindsided by nasty surprises. and they do happen. like the world wars. the 1960s crime boom. the opioid epidemic in the united states. also there are severe global challenges that we have not yet solved. prominent among them are climate change and the threat of nuclear war, an improbable but potentially catastrophic event. i think we are best off seeing these as problems or that are unsolved but solvable. climate change must be addressed by dhi decarbonization via carbn pricing including carbon taxes

and low, zero and eventually negative carbon technologies. denuclearization ought to be pursued via enhancing international stability and programs of threat reduction and arms reduction. two more graphs which i would show you if i was showing graphs show that progress in both of these endeavors is by no means a utopian aspiration, but to some extent it's been happening. if you plot the amount of co2 that countries emit per dollar of gdp, you find that there is an arc that britain, for example, first country to industrialize had huge carbon emissions when it relied on wood and coal but then less as it switched to oil and gas and renewables and nuclear. the united states followed the same u-shape curve. china has repeated that trajectory. india and the world as a whole.

so industrialization is not inexorably committed to flaming carbon, but decarbonization is a process that has begun. it has to be accelerated much more. it has to be brought to zero. but those graphs suggest that it is not impossible. likewise, few people are aware that the world's nuclear arsenal has been reduced by 85% since the height of the kohl war. cold war. indeed, about 10% of american energy comes from nuclear power from demissioned soviet -- decommissioned soviet weapons. again, that ideally should be brought to zero. final question that i'll raise, does the enlightenment somehow go against human nature. this is a frequent accusation from defenders of religion and nationalism. humanism all sounds very good, but isn't it kind of arid or a flattened view of human life? as if conquest of disease,

famine, poverty, violence and ignorance is boring. do people need to believe in magic, a father in the sky, a strong chief to protect the tribe, myths of heroic ancestors? well, i don't think so. for one thing, secular liberal democrats have proven themselves -- democracies have proven themselves to be the happiest and healthiest places on earth, probably in the history of our species. also i dare say applying knowledge and sympathy when properly appreciated is heroic, glorious and, i dare say, spiritual. thank you very much. [applause] have i used up all the time, or is there time left for questions? >> we've got some time for questions from the audience.

just raise your hand, i do have a q&a mic. we'll get to as many folks as we can, and please do keep your questions to questions. thank you. >> hi. steven, i have a lot of admiration for you as a public intellectual. you write some great books to read, and i'm not about to argue with your statistics on human history. however, i think your unfettered optimism is a bit irrational. i think it was martin rees who said a good way to figure out how long things are going to last is to see how long they've lasted. and the enlightenment and modern western civilization is only a couple of hundred years old. i was looking at the curve of gdp, and it feels like it's just going against the thermodynamic gradient. it feels like you're going to fall off. don't you think maybe this is a local maximum and that with the uncertainty of climate change and artificial intelligence that all bets are off? >> well, a few things. there's no law of physics or the

universe that says that gdp growth has to level off or stop because gdp isn't about stuff, gdp is about things that people value. and in particular as with the advance in technology, we get more and more human benefit with fewer and fewer atoms. i mean, our smartphone has replaced something like 50 appliances. most wealthy countries have reached peak stuff, that is, we consume less timber, less steel, less of every resource. but life keeps getting more and more interesting because we process bits on our cell phones. so gdp, there's no law that says that gdp has to level off. that is a myth. climate change, indeed, is ap unsolved problem, as i mentioned, and maybe we won't solve it. maybe we will. paths towards decarbonization have been laid out. there is no law of physics that says we cannot solve the problem. there may be a lack of political coordination and will, but there's plenty of foe tons that hits the world's surface from

solar energy, there are plenty of opportunities from nuclear energy to supply the world's energy needs even with exponential growth continuing into the future. in terms of the long run, like the very long run, well, yeah, the sun's going to expand into a red giant, it's going to boil away our oceans, we are going to die, and, you know, in the long one we're dead. and so there is undoubtedly a local maximum in the span of millennia, hundreds of millennia, millions of years -- ..

y2k. plains were going to fall from the sky, nuclear power plants were going to melted down tim think the threat from artificial intelligence is in this category, nuclear war and climate change are real, but i'm not worried about robots. >> so, first off, thank you for coming today and the great talk. if the main stream media negative? >> there is something of a tradeoff, and i do discuss that in the chapter on happiness. one reason that i speculate -- no one know this reason -- why given the rising objective for fortunes or america, why has air happiness stagnated and the percentage of americans who call themselves extremely happy has gradually sunk somewhat, and some of it may be that as we have become more aware of the world's problems, just as win we

grow up and we become more mature, our worries, burdens, increases, win we become grownups we have to pay the represent and make a living and put food on the table. as a species we have to worry about things that people a couple generations ago did not worry out. in the 1950s, the peak of american influence, people didn't worry about racial inequality, didn't worry about nuclear war. there was the atomic cafe, atomic bombs were cute in the early 1950s. housewives enjoyed domestic bliss with appliances, poverty was invisible and african-americans were invisible and as we became more aware of policy blunders, poverty, environmental degradation, it wasn't surprising that each one of us might add to our personal worry list some of the world's

problems. now there are people who are anxious about climate change, even though there's nothing whatsoever they personally can do. there is something of a tradeoff and i think one of the challenges to us as individuals is how to be mature and responsible about taking the world's problems seriously without all of us worrying ourselves to death, whether it is through mindfulness or medication or cognitive behavior therapy or pharmaceuticals or advice from wise people, it's a challenge as we grow up. >> thank you for being here, i was wondering what you thought causes the enlean i lightenment. you -- enlightenment. you can them of i'm history and civilization being relatively new, but even in that span, it's only the 1700s sort of that made

people value describes and humanism. how can you think of those causes -- >> it's a great question and as with all historical questions, the problem being that its only happened once so can't rewind at the tame and plate thousands of times and add up the different outcomes. there were predecessors to enlightenment ideas in classical greece and the renaissance. one possibility is historical memory of the carnage of the woofers religion, of the 15th 15th and 16th -- exterior -- 16th and 17th centuries, and people realized that hero rick results happen when your take your religious beliefs too seriously and he protestants massacred catholics, et cetera, and the science age showed age-old convictions could be flat wrong and that the path to understanding had to be in applying reason, making beliefs

tentative, subject to empirical verification. the age of exploration, the fact that nyely new continents came few people's consciousness, with all of these peoples doing things very differently than europeans did, forcing you to step back and they were -- enlightenment thinkers were cultural anthropologists and saying thats we have taken for granted so be given another look. the final contributor may have been a technological development. the only industry that showed a huge increase in efficiency prior to the industrial revolution of then 19th century, was publishing. in the 18th century, the cost of printing a book or a pamphlet and distributing it plunged, at the same time as literacy surpassed the 50% mark for the first anytime european history. ideas proliferated. pamphlets and broad size and

treatise and manifestos went viral by the standards of the day, which meant they proliferated in a matter of weeks. so there's a huge exchange of ideas and people became more mobile. it was ear 'er -- if your were persecuted you could hop on a ship and good to amsterdam or to london, and when the heat got too high and a light of the enlightenment thinker were per accused and managed instead of being beheaded they found safe haven found somewhere else. >> i enjoyed the book and this talk and i'm looking forward to your take with sam harris, and my question is, on the topic of artificial intelligence, you suggest in the book the way to deal with -- the way to deal with the risk of malevolent

super intelligent a.i. is simple, don't build one. it seems like the intelligent miami who are concerned about the risks of a.i. think it will be mall -- mall live mall live lent. is is realistic to expect that simply not building one is a viable possibility? >> i do. i have an extensive discussion of it in a chapter on so-called execs existential think. we have to resist the tame that is that as things get smarter, they get more ambitious and malevolent. we project human primate psychology on the concept of intelligence, and it's inevitable as computers get smarter, they want toll control more sources and see is as

rivals and i argue that's a fallacy. a more sophisticated argument, called a value alignment problem, they won't want to dominate us or displace it us but will be collateral damage for their -- we say, robot, cancer ask it and will draft is us a guinea pigs and say increase happiness and we trade in happiness with a picture of the smile and will tile the universe with spilly faces and convert every atom in the universe into a smiley face. i think these scenarios are actually self-refuting. for one thing, they assume that we are going to be so brilliant that we'll design an artificial intelligence with the power to cure cure cancer but so stupid we'll give it control over our bodies and society without think, well, gee, what could

possibly go wrong and that the intelligence will be so brilliant it could devise experiments that would cure cancer, but so idiotic it would interpret our goals we set so literally that it would kill us all in the process. i think these are -- not just exotic but i think badly conceived scenarios. even someone like elon musk, why is he building self-drives cars. isn't he worry someone will program in, tack me to the airport the fastest route possible and the car will gone in a straight line and mow people down and crash through buildings? he's not worried about that because he wouldn't build a car that would accept a command like this, and real artificial intelligence won't be built -- won't give it control over every

molecule in the universe. won't -- the idea that intelligence will take off in such a unstoppable exponential process is falling victim to the current hype cycle in a.i., which a.i. is always subject to and that a lot of the current systems are, for all their successes are not us a brilliant as they're made out to be. a widespread understand offering the people in the trenches of a.i. research and also, the scenarios confuse general intelligence with the hypothetical entity that knows the position of every molecule in the universe and can predict what will happen by sure calculation. what real intelligence consist of is interacting with the world by trial and error empire'll and always be a limitation of how

smart a system can get to based on how embodied it is, how connected it is to the real world of atoms, and so the fantasies take off faster than we can control it is disconnected from the annual that i -- actual nature of intelligence. >> we have not had a single woman asking a question. >> i'm sorry. i've given it to this gentleman but i will toss it to a woman. >> thank you. i am a huge fan of your work, i feel like a lot of us are saying -- well, sound great, but what about x1, what about x1xb terrible. you talk about the increase in intelligence and you mentioned in the book it's started to slow down. any -- >> yes. >> that may re verse? i think bit studies another intelligence and number of children being inversely

correlated in some western countries. is that a cause for concern? >> things -- i think it's called can't go on forever that don't and the fluid effect has leveled off in the countries in which it's gone on the longest. won't keep increasing. whether there will be some disgennic effect -- as best we can tell that doesn't seem to be a strong effect doesn't seem to be strong enough to reverse the affect going in the other direction. the world contains -- if you think but what percentage of the world has not had the opportunity to put its innate intelligence to full use, the percentage of people in asia, in africa, all these -- the top one percent of the iq distribution

that has not gone to college or graduate school, that probably will in the next several decades if current trend towards education continue. could be a massive recruitment of underused brain power in the globe that would swamp aniedocracy scenario. >> perhaps our final or second to last question over here. >> thank you for the talk. my question for you is, in relationship to your finding of the happiness factor being leveled off for us in the united states. correct? >> yeah. >> and the cdc2016 causes of death and the 2016 morbidity all correlate to what seems to be the stress factor, our ways of -- bruce mccune's work with the stress cycle, and itself is

not that is going on is how we perceive that, it is us because of our negativity bias, that we're always looking for worse case scenario and our inabilities, and the earth institute, columbia's earth institute and united nations did a sustainable happiness, what is the happiness factors and the world factors that were identified were positive emotion, resilience, mindfulness and pro social emotions. >> and freedom and gdp per capita. >> uh-huh. >> the under one and number two. but those are also factors, all of them. social trust, lack of corruption. >> yes. so, that things to -- the things regarding the news, i mean, that again -- it's again towards the negativity factor, right? becomes news because it is more the exception than it is the common factor for us.

>> indeed. i should emphasize that progress does not mean everything gets better for everyone always. that would be magic. that wouldn't be science-driven problem solving. in the united states in the last five to ten years there's ban regression in particular sector of the population, identified -- namely, concentrated in less educated, more rural, baby-boomer white men, where life expectancy has gone down, suicide has gone up. the life expectancy -- enough of them that it's dragged down the life expectancy for the country has a whole. defining the pattern of the rest of the world. this is an example of how there can be local reversals of progress, and indeed the stress might be a contributor, the negative health effect of stress, because it's concentrated in sectors there

has has been an unemployment and underemployment, could also be more direct, namely, the loss of healthcare and health benefit is. some of it is self-inflicted because of the availability of opioids, some of it driven by suicide. so this is unmistakably a reversal of progress in certain sectors of the united states, and one that is imperative to address but just an example of how progress doesn't happen by itself. we have to identify the problems and then solve each one in turn. >> i think it's time for the signing. unless you have any final commends. [applause] >> big round of applause to steven pinker. unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies and

today we continue to bring you unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court, and public policy events aroundington, d.c., and the country. c-span >> steeled ands cotton as the forefront of the manufacturing industry and it's different. mostly making capital goods as the literal building of america depends on its. in the beginning the key this railroad system. the railroad system need rails and that's what the u.s. iron and steel industry grows up on. also eventually girdsers and machinery, armaments, american naval power, even those civil war, the great battle of merrimac, the armor.

so it's economically important, it's kind of symbolically important. kind of the great age of iron. you think of the eiffel tower, which is made of iron, bolted together. the great symbol of the new age, and i think many countries, including the united states, come to believe that you can't have kind of full sovereignty and autonomy as a nation unless you have an iron and steel destroy it and become this biggest-the coast capitalized industry in the united states, and out of it grows kinds of fortunes that had never been seen in this country before. carnegie and eventually comes the morgans, combines, and so it is symbolic and just kind of technically and necessarily to the new nation, and the scale of these places is amazing. just gigantic. >> with regard to the rise of steel and machinery, one thing that is what is eye-opening for

me, we hear about the crystal palace and the beginning of world affairs but had not realized what was the main purpose of the world fair to introduce people to machinery and manufacturing. >> it's a set piece in the become but you can't resist it. in 1876, when the united states celebrates the 100th 100th anniversary of the declares of independence, there's this big kind of worlds fair type thing in philadelphia in what's now fairmont poock, the centennial exhibition, what is the centerpiece? it's this building of machinery with this gigantic steam engine, which then runs shafts and belts and pull questions that run this gigantic room full of machinery and they opened the fair when president grant turns -- and the emperor of brazil, who just seemed to happen to be around at the moment so the two of them both turn these sea valves and this room full of machinery

springs to life. an odd way to celebrate the declaration of independence except that the kind of notion of national greatness. it has been us early-utterly transform. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> good evening. welcome. if you would please turn off all your