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February 3 - May 25, 2025
One analysis estimates that the introduction of the printing press in the fifteenth century caused a 340-fold decrease in the price of a book, further driving adoption and yet more demand.
Gutenberg just wanted to make money printing Bibles. Yet his press catalyzed the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation, and so became the greatest threat to the Catholic Church since its establishment.
Oh the irony
any technology is capable of going wrong, often in ways that directly contradict its original purpose.
Technology’s problem here is a containment problem.
Fear and suspicion of anything new and different are endemic. Everyone from guilds of skilled craftsmen to suspicious monarchs has reason to push back. Luddites, the groups that violently rejected industrial techniques, are not the exception to the arrival of new technologies; they are the norm.
Change management
Carlson curve: the epic collapse in costs for sequencing DNA.
At launch, the PlayStation 2 was regarded by the U.S. Department of Defense as so powerful that it could potentially help hostile militaries usually denied access to such hardware.
Dual-use technologies are both helpful and potentially destructive, tools and weapons.
Over time, technology tends toward generality. What this means is that weaponizable or harmful uses of the coming wave will be possible regardless of whether this was intended.
Anticipating the full spectrum of use cases in history’s most omni-use wave is harder than ever.
Can't we just ask AI to create this list?
relentless thirst for profit.
The truth is that the curiosity of academic researchers or the will of motivated governments is insufficient to propel new breakthroughs into the hands of billions of consumers. Science has to be converted into useful and desirable products for it to truly spread far and wide. Put simply: most technology is made to earn money.
much of what we see around us is powered by human intelligence in direct pursuit of monetary gain.
materials for just one EV require extracting around 225 tons of finite raw materials, demand for which is already spiking unsustainably.
Lest anyone think evs are environmentally or socially responsible
Technology is ultimately political because technology is a form of power. And perhaps the single overriding characteristic of the coming wave is that it will democratize access to power.
This will be the greatest, most rapid accelerant of wealth and prosperity in human history. It will also be one of the most chaotic.
The cost of military-grade drones has fallen by three orders of magnitude over the last decade.
The Private Sector Job Quality Index, a measure of how many jobs provide above-average income, has plunged since 1990; it suggests that well-paying jobs as a proportion of the total have already started to fall.
growing access to power means everyone’s power
will be amplified.
Companies, militaries, bureaucracies, even markets—these are artificial intelligences, aggregating and processing huge amounts of data, organizing themselves around specific goals, building mechanisms to get better and better at achieving those goals.
More than one hundred U.S. towns have even acquired technology developed for use on the Uighurs in Xinjiang.
Openness is the default, imitations are endemic, cost curves relentlessly go down, and barriers to access crumble. Exponential capabilities are given to anyone who wants them.
colossal redistribution of power away from existing centers.
Social media created a few giants and a million tribes.
AI is both valuable and dangerous precisely because it’s an extension of our best and worst selves.
As the coming wave matures, however, the tools of destruction will, as we’ve seen, be democratized and commoditized.
Some will inevitably say this: centralize power to an extreme degree, build the panopticon, and tightly orchestrate every aspect of life to ensure that no
pandemic or rogue AI ever happens.
total control, backed by hard power.
Catastrophe and dystopia.
Demand for lithium, cobalt, and graphite is set to rise 500 percent by 2030.
Exponential change is coming. It is inevitable. That fact needs to be addressed.
the real question is what to actually do about it.
Saying “Regulation!” in the face of awesome technological change is the easy part. It’s also the classic pessimism-averse answer. It’s a simple way to shrug off the problem.
At the highest level we need a clear and simple goal, a banner imperative integrating all the different efforts around technology into a coherent package.
across all the fronts and risk zones and geographies at once.
This will never happen
Truth is, though, novel threats are just exceptionally difficult for any government to navigate. That’s not a flaw with the idea of government; it’s an assessment of the scale of the challenge before us.
The physicist Richard Feynman famously said, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” Today
What does a World Bank for biotech or a UN for AI look like? Could a secure international collaboration be the way to approach an issue as daunting and complex as AGI? Who is the ultimate arbiter, the lender of last resort as it were, the body that when asked “Who contains technology?” can put its hand up?
Safe, contained technology is, like liberal democracy, not a final end state; rather, it is an ongoing process, a delicate equilibrium that must be actively maintained, constantly fought for and protected.
In 2023 alone, there was nearly $200 billion of venture capital investment into AI companies.
Businesses have scarcely begun to refactor workflows and processes with AI in mind. The wave has not crested. That cross-catalyzing, cross-pollinating potential has only just begun.
