Carissa Véliz

Yes, predictions about the social world act like magnets.

They tend to bend reality towards themselves.

And so the first thing to note is that no prediction is ever a fact.

It can be at best an educated guess, but more often than not, it's a power play in disguise.

And instead of just accepting it as a fact and obeying and making the prediction become a self-fulfilling prophecy, maybe we should stop for a second.

And if we don't like the prediction that we're listening to, we should defy it.

Yes, it's a fundamental tool of Silicon Valley that they sell us a vision of the future.

And they sell it not as a hypothesis or a possibility, but that is inevitable.

They tell us that that is progress and that's what it looks like and there's nothing to do about it.

And that's a very authoritarian tactic.

We've seen it before in authoritarian regimes, but that it's being used by companies is no different, particularly companies that are so powerful.

And part of the duty of citizens in a democracy is to question that and to say, well, is that the future that we want?

And if not, what are we going to do to build the future that we want to live in?

Yes, and it's fascinating that even though there are thousands of books and even academic journals on prediction, there wasn't even one book on the ethics of prediction, on what kinds of predictions maybe we shouldn't do.

And one of the lessons is that next to leaders, you always find a profit.

And even though the technology of AI is very different from, say, astrology or the Oracle of Delphi, the political role that they play is actually quite similar.

And if you would have interviewed a medieval European and asked them about astrology, they would have said something like, well, it's a very technical discipline.

It's very hard to understand.

It's very opaque.

And it's a cutting edge decision making method.