Smart people become irrational around technology.
We want absolutes, purity and simple answers; whether it’s being anti-GMO or bullish on AI, the impulse is the same: to eliminate doubt.
We can’t.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you religion not reasoning. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
The geniuses on Wall Street needed to be bailed out by the working stiffs on Main Street. The brilliant minds of Silicon Valley can’t figure out how to house elementary school teachers.
Here’s a responsible, pro-technology manifesto: Make society less brittle, invest resources in redundancy rather than trick shots, refuse to pay for silver bullets.
Instead of trying to cheat death, make dying dignified and gentle and graceful.
We should ridicule men who would rather become machines than confront their fundamental, ineffable weakness. That we err, that we die, is our fortune.
Fortunes (fortuna) are made of calamity. (Quite literally in the case of the big short, aka, “betting on the blind side”.)
Learning to lose is our one chance at immortality.
I was reminded of this when Facebook reminded me of a post I’d made four years earlier:
The basic point being that no matter how much we may want to predict the future, software won’t and can’t. “David X Li copula function” is a simple warning / proof. It applies to all fields.
Below is a medieval illustration of a wheel of fortune:
And a contemporary wheel of fortune:
