☹️ Writing about Max Tegmark and Paul Ehrlich in Fokus

In the magazine Fokus, I write about Max Tegmark and compare him with the arch pessimist Paul Ehrlich. Here is the opening paragraphs:

"Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come," said American biology professor Paul Ehrlich to CBS News in 1970. He was then at the beginning of his career as an international star and one of the late 20th century's most entrenched pessimists with his message that humanity would soon perish from overpopulation and mass starvation.

Here is another dystopia: "There will be no people on the planet in the not too distant future." But now it is not Paul Ehrlich speaking but the Swedish MIT professor Max Tegmark who said so in a conversation about AI in Lex Fridman's podcast last spring. Tegmark is today, like Ehrlich half a century ago, on his way to the same status as his era's greatest pessimist.

Max Tegmark is our time's Paul Ehrlich.