More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 18 - February 25, 2024
FOUR FEATURES:
The unique characteristics of the coming wave that exacerbate the challenge of containment. They are asymmetry, hyper-evolution, omni-use, and autonomy.
FRAGILITY AMPLIFIERS:
THE GRAND BARGAIN:
PESSIMISM AVERSION:
The above was written by an AI. The rest is not, although it soon could be. This is what’s coming.
Permeating humanity’s oral traditions and ancient writings is the idea of a giant wave sweeping everything in its path, leaving the world remade and reborn.
The sheer power of these swells has seared itself into our collective consciousness: walls of water, unstoppable, uncontrollable, uncontainable. These are some of the most powerful forces on the planet.
Homo technologicus—of
The coming wave is defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology.
it appears that containing this wave—that is, controlling, curbing, or even stopping it—is not possible.
What if we could distill the essence of what makes us humans so productive and capable into software, into an algorithm?
To achieve this objective, we would need to create a system that could imitate and then eventually outperform all human cognitive abilities, from vision and speech to planning and imagination, and ultimately empathy and creativity.
cloistered
We take speech-to-text transcription and instant language translation for granted.
attempting to ban development of new technologies is itself a risk: technologically stagnant societies are historically unstable and prone to collapse. Eventually, they lose the capacity to solve problems, to progress.
The current discourse around technology ethics and safety is inadequate.
First come more efficient ways of doing specific tasks, and then entire roles become redundant, and soon entire sectors require orders of magnitude fewer workers.
a single person today likely “has the capacity to kill a billion people.” All it takes is motivation.
pessimism-aversion trap:
the misguided analysis that arises when you are overwhelmed by a fear of confronting potentially dark realities, and the resulting tendency to look the other way.
Spend time in tech or policy circles, and it quickly becomes obvious that head-in-the-sand is the default ideology.
A global pandemic showcased both the risks and the potency of synthetic biology.
We urgently need watertight answers for how the coming wave can be controlled and contained, how the safeguards and affordances of the democratic nation-state can be maintained, but right now no one has such a plan.
The various technologies I’m speaking of share four key features that explain why this isn’t business as usual: they are inherently general and therefore omni-use, they hyper-evolve, they have asymmetric impacts, and, in some respects, they are increasingly autonomous.
pendulous
Nicolaus August Otto
Gottlieb Daimler
Wilhelm Maybach.
Carl Benz,
in 1886 he patented the Motorwagen, now seen as the world’s first proper car.
was only when Benz’s wife and business partner, Bertha, drove the car from Mannheim to her mother’s, sixty-five miles away in Pforzhe...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Most cars at the time cost around $2,000. Ford priced his at $850.
“Every time I reduce the charge for our car by one dollar, I get a thousand new buyers.”
In 1915 only 10 percent of Americans had a car; by 1930 this number had reached an astonishing 59 percent.
flint
a wave is a set of technologies coming together around the same time, powered by one or several new general-purpose technologies with profound societal implications.
Language, agriculture, writing—each was a general-purpose technology at the center of an early wave. These three waves formed the foundation of civilization as we know it. Now we take them for granted.
crucibles
At the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution the worldwide human population numbered just 2.4 million. At the start of the Industrial Revolution, it approached 1 billion, a four-hundred-fold increase that was predicated on the waves of the intervening period.
From the written word to sailing vessels, technology increases interconnectedness, helping to boost its own flow and spread. Each wave hence lays the groundwork for successive waves.
Technological waves don’t arrive with the neat predictability of the tides. Over the long term, waves erratically intersect and intensify.
For the futurist Alvin Toffler, the information technology revolution was a “third wave” in human society following the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions.
the same amount of labor that once produced fifty-four minutes of quality light in the eighteenth century now produces more than fifty years of light.
Proliferation is catalyzed by two forces: demand and the resulting cost decreases, each of which drives technology to become even better and cheaper.
behind technological breakthroughs are people.
motivated by money, fame, and often knowledge itself.
copying is a critical driver of diffusion. Mimicry spurs competition, and technologies improve further.
In the 1940s, Bletchley Park, Britain’s top secret World War II code-breaking hub,
Robert Noyce
