It’s the ambiguity. It’s not knowing what you’re doing or what’s expected of you. Uncertainty about the next right thing.
It’s the feeling of incompetence, not being sure that it’ll work or if you’re even capable of it.
Most jobs can be quite fulfilling, but not knowing what needs to be done, or how, robs us of that satisfaction.
And in the Information Age, with ever greater numbers of bullshit jobs and technology advancing faster than ever, that uncertainty becomes more prevalent each day.
David Meerman Scott published a fascinating article a few days ago. It compares modern AI companies to Enron and that company’s financial scandal that broke in 2001.
But one paragraph in particular stood out to me that warrants quoting in full:
Altman says there’s a chance that so-called Artificial General Intelligence (which is still years or decades away) has the possibility of turning against humans. “I think that whether the chance of existential calamity is 0.5 percent or 50 percent, we should still take it seriously,” Altman says. “I don’t have an exact number, but I’m closer to the 0.5 than the 50.” (Source)
Terrifying, right?
I would argue that if you are creating something that has anything other than a 0% chance of wiping out humanity, you probably shouldn’t do it.
For example: marketing Pepsi to be consumed in massive amounts, while definitely bad for humans, doesn’t run the risk of causing mass extinction.
On the other hand, bringing Tyrannosaurus rex back to life definitely has a greater than 0% chance of doing just that.
Now, I’m not a doomsday prepper by any stretch of the imagination… But when someone tells me there’s even a small chance that what they’re making could turn out like The Matrix, I start to worry.
It’s as if they never watched I, Robot or read Jurassic Park (which is actually about runaway technology, not dinosaurs).
These companies have a responsibility to guarantee that this doesn’t happen. We already made this mistake with nuclear weapons. And that threat still looms large over our heads, especially right now during the Russo-Ukraine War.
We have enough threats to deal with. Let’s not create more of our own volition.
I’ll leave you with my favorite quote from Jurassic Park:
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
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Denis Waitley was wildly optimistic about the future when he recorded “The Psychology of Winning” in the 1990s.
Here are just some of those predictions:
Denis also predicted that by the year 2000, women would have equal pay with men and be equally represented in business schools, law schools, and entrepreneurial startups.
Like I said, wildly optimistic. It might even seem laughable, like something out of a futuristic 80s movie.
And yet…
We are so busy trying to get back to normal after this pandemic, we’ve somehow lost all the opportunity to actually make these happen.
Because of COVID-19, we already did 100% online, virtual education for a year and a half. It wasn’t perfect (far from it). But it worked. It’s been shown to be possible.
But we were so busy being focused on “getting back to normal,” we seemed to have missed the opportunity to push it further and make it better.
I don’t know the first thing about hydrogen scrubbing and powered cars. But I do know we have the technology for all-electric vehicles that don’t pump pollution and toxins into the air on a daily basis (multiple companies have this tech).
But instead, we’re buying bigger, badder, less efficient, gas-guzzling, pollution-admitting, tank-like vehicles, all in an effort to make a statement about our political views or our masculinity.
And here we are, 22 past after the year 2000… And women are still fighting for equal pay, equal representation, and control over their own bodies, not to mention all the other genders and races fighting for the same things.
So yes, Dennis was wildly optimistic. But it’s understandable why.
Because even back then the technology was coming online, the possibilities were there, and he saw them and thought, “Surely the world will embrace all of this—right?”
Yet here we are. Rejecting all of it out of hand.
Yes—some of these wonderful possibilities were forced on us by a horrible situation… Yet they were still wonderful opportunities.
But we were so desperate to go back to normal that we looked them in the face and said, “No thank you.”
We’re operating with 21st-century technology and possibilities while trying to stay in a 20th-century world. Why?
Because it’s the world we know. It’s the status quo. It’s “the regular kind.”
I feel like we missed a big opportunity here. And now I’m worried it may be years or decades before what’s possible actually comes to fruition.
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