- The United States is an outlier among affluent western democracies.

It's more or less democratic, but it has lower life expectancy.

Still a pretty happy country compared to the 193 countries in the world, but less happy than it should be given how rich it is.

[bright music] - Hello and welcome to "GZERO World".

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are looking at whether Paul McCartney was right all along.

Do we indeed have to admit it's "Getting better, a little better all the time?"

I'm talking about human progress and how we define it.

Look for one, I am thrilled that I'm not currently being chased by a saber tooth tiger.

The shot would be all out of focus.

Life is better than death.

Health is preferable to sickness.

Freedom, I'll take it over tyranny any day of the week.

In short, we know life is better today than it was for most of our ancestors, but how do we measure that progress and at what point does the technology that has improved our lives come back to bite us?

I'm looking at you, AI.

I'll tackle all that and more with Harvard psychologist Steve Pinker.

Don't worry, I've also got your Puppet Regime.

- If we get involved in your conflict, that could lead to the end of all Greek life on Earth as we know it.

- But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator] Every day all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Announcer] And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO".

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerry and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York and.

[lighthearted music] [logo whooshes] - Human progress doesn't have a finish line.

Our body clocks stop ticking at some point, but that's not the same as reaching a destination or achieving a goal.

So how do we as a community, as a country, as eight billion on the planet define progress?

What does better even look like, in a word laundry?

In 1920, the average American spent 11.5 hours a week doing laundry, and that average American was almost always a woman.

Dudes just kept wearing dirty clothes.

By 2014, the number had dropped to 1.5 hours a week, thanks to what renowned public health scholar Hans Rosling has called and I quote, "The greatest invention of the industrial revolution," the washing machine.

By freeing people of washing laundry by hand, this new technology allowed parents to devote more time to educating their clean children, and it allowed women to cultivate a life beyond the washboard.

And while globally women continue to get stuck with the lion's share of household chores, the automation of laundry is just one of many metrics that my guest today, Harvard psychologist Steve Pinker uses to measure human progress.

And it's not just being Canadian that's making him optimistic.

Some more fun facts from Pinker's work.

You are 37 times less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning today than you were at the turn of the 20th century.

Lightning strikes just as often, but now we can predict it better and lightning isn't getting any smarter.

It's a good thing.

But our kids are, the global average IQ score is rising by about three IQ points every decade thanks to improved nutrition and childhood education, though the pandemic took us all back a few steps.

We are better abstract thinkers today too, thanks to the various symbols and squiggles we're constantly interpreting on our smartphones.

So as I always say to myself, whenever I'm stuck in traffic or on hold with customer service, there has never been a better time to be alive and yet, and yet, and yet war in Europe, famine in Africa, global pandemics, fake news, conspiracy theories, democracy dying in the bright light of day, and that's just your average Tuesday.

Don't forget this recent nugget from OpenAI, CEO, Sam Altman, the man behind the popular ChatGPT artificial intelligence tool.

- [Stephanie] He is one of 350 industry leaders to issue an even moral dire warning saying that if AI is left unchecked, it poses a quote risk of extinction.

And to be clear, he is talking about human extinction, our extinction.

- This was not an AI critic mind you, but your car's mechanic telling you that the brakes might not work in a mildly terrifying way.

It begs the question we started out with, how much is technology making our lives better today and how much is it the problem?

To talk about that and much more, I'm joined by the laundry lover himself, Steve Pinker.

Here's our conversation.

Steve Pinker, thanks so much for joining us on "GZERO World".

- Thanks for having me.

- So you're portrayed as this relentlessly optimistic macro thinker, but you would say, "Hey, I'm just looking at where the data is going."

- Indeed, and the view of the world you get from data is different from the one you get from journalism because journalism is a non-random sample of the most dramatic, usually the worst things that happen on Earth on a given day.

A lot of the positive developments are either things that don't happen, like there's a country where a war did not break out.

A city that has not been attacked by terrorists or things that unfold gradually, a few percentage points a year, which can compound, but there's never a Thursday in October in which it's a headline.

And so if you don't look at data, if you look at headlines since as long as bad things haven't vanished from the face of the Earth, which they never will, you can get the impression that things are unchanged or even are worse than ever, even when they're improving.

It's only when you count the number of wars, number of deaths in war, longevity, child mortality, extreme poverty, number of leisure hours that you see that there actually has been improvement.

A fact that you can miss if you just follow the headlines.

- Life expectancy, infant mortality, education rates, I mean almost all of those things, if you look over the last say, 50 years, unprecedented improvement in the human condition.

- Indeed, it's not magic.

It doesn't happen everywhere all the time.

Some things do get worse sometimes because the world does not contain any force that just lifts humanity up.

Quite the contrary, the laws of the universe kind of grind us down.

It's only when people apply their ingenuity to try to improve the human condition that every once in a while we succeed.

If we try not to repeat our mistakes, then progress is possible on average, but not everywhere always.

- Now, by that, I generally agree with this.

So let's have a few minutes on celebrating that, though I'm then going to focus on some places where maybe it doesn't apply as well and particularly right now.

But if we wanted to look in the last couple generations, so since you and I were kids, what are a couple of individual data points, things that have happened that feel the most like magic compared to who you were at that point?

- The decline in extreme poverty would have to be one of them.

Global poverty now is estimated to be maybe 8 or 9% of the world's population.

200 years ago it was 90% of the world's population, and even 30 years ago, there were a billion more extremely poor people than there are today.

So that would be way up there.

Illiteracy, probably today among young people, maybe 10% are illiterate.

It used to be more than half.

Even number of wars, and not withstanding the horrific war in Ukraine, the war in Sudan, the recently concluded war in Ethiopia, which has led to an uptick in the wrong direction.

But if you compare the number of wars and the number of people killed in wars in the '60s and the '70s and even the '80s, we're actually much better off today.

- Are there any particular turning points that you would point to?

I mean, is it the semiconductor?

Is it the internet?

Is it people just having mobility they didn't have before?

What are the things that facilitated that?

- Globalization probably had something to do with it.

All of these things are statistical probabilistic.

You can always find exceptions, but generally, if the world is more knitted together in commerce, if you get rich by buying things instead of stealing them, if you have customers that you don't want to kill, if you belong to a club of trading nations, it doesn't guarantee that you won't go to war, but it lowers the odds, it changes the incentives.

The fact that wealth no longer comes from land as it did a couple of hundred years ago.

If you want to get rich, you don't need more and more and more farmland, but better tech, more knowledge.

Rise of democracy, not a perfect guarantor of peace by any means, but seems to be a- - And not moving in the right direction now.

- And not moving in the right direction now, but statistically as a contributor to peace.

Also, it's hard to put your finger on this vague thing called norms, expectations, values, but there's probably less of an emphasis on, in most of the world, or in much of the world, on national glory preeminence and more on human wellbeing.

That is nations are somewhat more interested in keeping their citizens educated and rich and well-fed compared to having more square inches on a map.

- Now you sound very Canadian when you say that.

- Yes.

- Which you are.

- Which I am.

- Yeah.

Now why are the Canadians seemingly a little more well run and happier than the Americans these days?

- A better question is maybe why is the United States punched below its wealth in so many measures of wellbeing?

- Given how much capability economically the Americans have?

No question.

- The United States is an outlier among affluent western democracies.

Canada is not so different from the other commonwealth countries like Australia, New Zealand, Britain itself, Western and Northern Europe.

But the United States is the anomaly because it is rich.

It's more or less democratic, but it has lower life expectancy.

It has poor scores on math tests, has more obesity, more drug addiction, more violence.

- And you think we'd be fat and happy, but it turns out we're fat and unhappy.

- Yes, literally we are fat.

- So why do you think?

- And less happy, by the way, the United States is less happy than it ought to be given its affluence and freedom.

- So what are your views?

I mean, you're a cognitive psychologist, you live around Americans.

What's your view?

Why is that?

- There's probably an optimum amount of government support for social services for old age, for the poor.

The United States probably falls below it.

Now there can be too much and there can be too little, and I think the United States is probably on the wrong side of that curve.

So people are more anxious about losing their job if they get sick, about becoming destitute.

There's less government attention to poverty and segregation and other problems that the government tends to take on in other countries.

Also, the United States has a tradition, especially parts of the United States, the south and the southwest of hostility to any centralized government and planning.

It's much more of vigilante justice.

Every man defends his own home, defends his honor and must secure the credibility of his implicit threat by responding to insults.

And so Americans are more likely to get into stupid barroom brawls and lethal disputes over a parking spot and road rage.

Europeans and Canadians are more likely to- - Not have parking spots.

Yeah, exactly.

- Right.

That might help too.

- Fair enough.

So I think that's a good way of putting it, and there's no question that if you take the objective data of US growth and wealth as well, over the last 50 years, there's been an extraordinary uptick.

It hasn't come with a sense of wellbeing of the average American.

- Not as much as you'd expect.

I mean, the United States is still a pretty happy country compared to the 193 countries in the world, but less happy than it should be given how rich it is.

- How much do you blame the structure of the media as opposed to just the job that journalists have always had?

Because I mean, it's not new.

I mean people that are writing are writing things that people want to read on the day, but has that changed over the last decades, even before we talk about social media and algorithms, but has it changed just the media itself?

- It has that there have been quantifiable trends for the media to become more negative, more pessimistic, even as the objective indicators of the world have improved, but the news is getting more and more morose.

You can quantify that by just counting the number of negative words and number of positive words.

So that misinforms people about the state of the world, it means that they become cynical about the causes of global improvement, that they fail to appreciate what has been working.

Often they just check out and become either fatalistic, like the world is going to end by 2050, so we should just enjoy ourselves while we can.

Or radical, the system is so dysfunctional that we should just burn it all down because anything that replaces it is bound to be better than what we have now.

By not focusing on the successes, many of which are only visible through data and not through events, since they're often non-events, I think the media can give a misleading portrait of the world.

- We've talked a fair amount about globalization and all the things that have been positive of the comfort.

I want to focus on some of the pushback.

First, we're coming out of the pandemic, and for the last three years, the human development indicators that have come out of the United Nations, which had been getting better and better and better all over the world for 50 years, have shown five years of moving back, lack of progress over the last three for the world, including on indicators like extreme poverty.

How much does that concern you?

- Oh, it does, and again, it would be a shock if it hadn't.

I mean, a pandemic is a real event that makes hundreds of millions of people worse off, makes the economy worse off.

It almost had to.

The question is, did it reverse, will it reverse the curve?

Unlikely, we don't know.

But just taking as a point of comparison, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1919, if you look at the curves for life expectancy and prosperity, you can see a definite notch.

But then as the pandemic receded, the progress resumed.

Likewise for HIV/AIDS in Africa, life expectancy really went down.

But then with the spread of antiretroviral drugs, it resumed its upward course.

- Now, if it was just the pandemic set against trends of evermore globalization, I would immediately say that sounds right and be optimistic.

I'm not so sure in the sense that as you intimated before, we don't have the same level of support among populations for open borders, free trade.

Indeed, we see a lot of retrenchment.

We see a lot of industrial policy.

We see a lot of near shoring, friend shoring, whatever term you want to use.

It's definitely not, let's make sure that things are as cheap as possible for everybody.

Let's make sure that we take care of global poverty.

It's my backyard that really matters.

That's US versus China, it's Russia versus the advanced industrial economies.

It's pretty much every populous movement around the world.

Do you think that globalization, not necessarily reversing, but at least plateauing, do you see that happening structurally leaving aside the pandemic?

- Yes.

Maybe, but maybe not is the way I'll put it because of course, you're right.

The populous movements are pushing back against globalization, nationalism, both from the right and from the left.

But there's at least a force pushing toward greater globalization, namely the basic laws of economics that say that's a way to get rich.

And people are always going, together with all the other things they want, they are going to want more cheap stuff.

They're going to want to get richer.

And so that's at least a push in the direction opposing populism.

Which one's going to be stronger and for how long?

Impossible to say.

- Now let's move to the topic du jour, which is artificial intelligence.

And I worry not so much that AI is going to suddenly do all of these things that human beings could never do, but rather that it will be seen as really convincing and compelling by lots of other human beings.

We're already at the place where you or I or others engaged in a conversation with AI are prepared to believe things that are just not so.

- Well in fact, this has been known by AI researchers for decades that people are too easily fooled, that it doesn't take much to fool a user or an observer into attributing a lot of intelligence to the system that they're dealing with, even if it's rather stupid.

Back in the '70s, the first chatbot, the predecessor of all these large language models just had a list of maybe 20 or 25 canned responses to questions.

It simulated a therapist.

So if you say, "Last night I dreamed that X," it'll respond.

"Have you ever wished that X?"

This is not very bright.

- How does that make you feel?

- Tell me more, tell me more about your mother.

People poured their heart out to the system.

They didn't realize that they were dealing with 25 canned responses.

So that is a problem in how we interpret it.

It's one of the reasons why the so-called Turing test from the great mathematician, Alan Turing- - Whether or not you can determine if something is a human being or a bot after 15 minutes of conversation.

- Exactly.

Some people called it Turing's worst idea because it just all depends on how easy it's to fool a human.

And the answer is pretty easy.

- And the answer is, I mean, essentially the Turing test has already either been passed or will soon be passed right?

- Yeah.

And it is just not a very good test any more than if you ask a scientist, "How do plants grow?"

And you say, "Well, as soon as we can come up with a silk flower that someone can't distinguish from a real flower, then we'll know the answer."

Well, no, that's just a completely separate question.

So it's a red herring, I think.

The question is how does it really work?

- But it's really important if what you're trying to understand isn't the AI, but society.

- Well, yes, you're right.

And in fact, one of the dangers of the large language models is that people will vest undue confidence in them.

- Now, what does that mean for you in terms of limitations that need to be placed on AI?

For example, I mean, children whose very malleable social functioning on the basis of what they're exposed to.

Should there be rules that prevent children from having relationships with AI bots?

And should the companies that have platforms be legally responsible for ensuring that AI is indeed so labeled because of course none of that exists right now.

- Yes, certainly when it comes to children, there are all kinds of restrictions that we feel comfortable imposing that we don't on adults, so absolutely for children.

And some kind of labeling of providence is going to be increasingly important.

But at the same time, since it's never going to be perfect, it will involve more trust in institutions that guarantee providence.

So with say, the proliferation of deepfakes of Joe Biden saying something that he convincingly, seemingly caught on video saying something that in fact he never said that was just digitally formulated, it may be that we are going to have to put more trust in CNN and the BBC and the New York Times and institutions that do the due diligence, that they are not just propagating deepfakes.

- At a time that the trust in those organizations is at its historic lowest.

- Indeed.

- So that's not credible.

So given that that's not going to happen, what needs to be the response to ensure that democracies don't erode much faster than they have?

- Yeah, and I don't think we know the answer.

I mean, it's tempting to say, well, let's just have more regulations.

But regulations can often have side effects or be ineffectual.

It may be a combination of things.

It may be that trust in this this will actually increase trust in the media because ultimately, even though people can be fooled, they don't want to be lied to.

They don't want believe things that are false.

So there is at least a force in the direction of people wanting some kind of veracity.

And it may push them toward, if not legacy organizations, but some form of certification or credibility that films and texts are accurate.

- Now, people don't want to believe things that are false.

You're a psychologist.

I want to pressure you on this because it seems to me that people are very happy believing things that are aligned with what they like, irrespective of whether it's false or true.

- Maybe a better way of putting it is that not everyone wants to believe in the same falsehoods, so you can't fool all the people all the time.

And so even though there'll be people who are, in fact, all of us are all too receptive to claims that are consistent with our own ideology, our own politics, our own tribal loyalties, we're still skeptical of other people's sacred beliefs.

And so in a democracy, in an ecosystem of debate, criticism, airing of ideas, even if some people believe falsehoods, not everyone believes- - The same falsehoods.

- Again, since not everyone has the same commitments to the same falsehoods.

You do want the truth about at least the things that aren't essential to your core identity.

Those are very hard to chip away at.

Fortunately, we don't all have the same ones.

So even though no person will necessarily gravitate to the truth, the ideal would be to set up rules of engagement of debate so that the entire nation, the entire community, while indulging people with all kinds of crazy beliefs, but that the greatest majority view, consensus view will be pushed in the direction of accuracy.

- Steve Pinker, thanks so much for joining us today.

- Thanks for having me.

[electronic music] - And now it's time for Puppet Regime.

Roll that tape.

- This fall, the crew from World High start a new chapter.

Welcome to World High, The College Years.

- Ain't no life like the Greek life Jack.

Who's Russian this year?

- Oh, I am not Russian.

But I am here to rush your fraternity.

- You again.

Come on, man.

I already told you we can't let you join.

- But you must.

I must be allowed to join Nu Alpha Tau Omega at once.

- Look there fella, you got real potential and we're happy to let you hang out with us, but we can't let you in.

- Why not?

- Because there's strict membership requirements to join Nu Alpha Tau Omega.

- Strict.

But you let him join.

- Who?

Turkey?

He's been a member since the '50s.

- Please, there must be something I can do to join.

- Well, you can start by ending your beef with the guys from Kappa Gamma Beta first.

- Those guys are the worst.

They say, I'm already part of frat because my father was part of frat.

This is like opposite of legacy admissions.

- Well, there's your problem, chief.

If you can get that issue squared away, we'd be happy to reconsider letting you join.

But if we get involved in your conflict, that could lead to the end of all Greek life on Earth as we know it.

And we don't want that.

- Please.

They are hazing me every day.

- Sorry, Jack.

If it's any consolation, we're proud of how you've handled the hazing, and we'd be happy to offer you as many kegs of light beer and as many tanks of party foam as you'd like.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I got to haze these new Swedes and Finns and you stay out of this.

♪ Puppet regime - That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you see or you're just feeling so much more uplifted, we've got the cure for that.

Check us out at gzeromedia.com.

[bright music] [bright music continues] [bright music continues] [bright music continues] [electronic music] - [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis, - [Narrator] Every day all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com - [Announcer] And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO".

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerry and Mary Joyce Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York and.

[lighthearted music] [electronic music]