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WELCOME TO THE UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS

Take a look at your calendar. Note the date. Today is the day the world changed forever.

Let’s step back into the human past for a moment, to 1992.

Even if you’ve never seen Jurassic Park, you know the quote, the one by a soon-to-be-gloriously-shirtless Dr. Ian Malcolm.

Dr. Ian Malcolm’s quote has stayed relevant because it has applied to many of the technological advancements we’ve made since 1992, and it applies very much to what’s happening in “artificial intelligence” — but not in the way you think.

To be clear: I’m not here to bash innovation, not by a long shot, friend.

The world is better in almost every measurable way since 1992 not just because of environmental protections, lawsuits, anti-smoking campaigns, and the Sustainable Development Goals, but also because of advancements in genome science, big data, medical devices, targeted cancer therapies, pharmacology, ART, heart disease, and so many more.

To answer Dr. Malcolm, we absolutely should have done these, because we could. We were finally, marvelously, technologically able, and millions of lives could have been — and were subsequently — improved by them.

Today, we can do many, many fruitful things, and we should do those, as well, because we understand them, and they are necessary.

For example, we have virtually every technology we need to build a world powered by renewable energy sources. And with climate change here, of course we “should” build them, to bring meaningful relief to billions of people, animals, and ecosystems. The only “can” holding us back is the political will to overcome trillions in fossil-fuel subsidies and industry lobbying to build what the hell we need to build.

Once we overcome those, we can, should, and will spend the next few decades building an abundant, incredible world, relieving the devastating burdens we’ve put upon the planet’s ecosystems and most marginalized people, and honestly accounting and paying for new tradeoffs along the way.

We can do those things, now, and simultaneously, because we have the information we need to understand them, and (some) time to most ethically execute them. These are the known knowns.

With AI, “can” is no longer a question of technical ability — we’re well past that — but a much more urgent question of how much change we can possibly absorb. It requires us to shift Malcolm’s question from “Should we do X?” to “Can we afford to do X, all things considered?”

This new AI era supersedes everything before it, where the abundance from its utter ubiquity will rapidly compound into known unknowns — which we have some experience with, but don’t handle very well — and soon, unknown unknowns, where fundamental assumptions of how society works evaporate and future shock becomes the status quo.

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