Carissa Véliz

That's exactly what we say about AI today.

Well, it's nerve wracking to be a human being.

We're in a way too smart because we know of everything that can go wrong and we want to avoid bad things from happening.

And we get the illusion that if we can see around the corner, that will make us safer and that it will give us a competitive advantage.

The trap is that that assumes that there's a script to be discovered, but the future is unwritten.

And in fact, it's unpredictable.

And not to be aware of that perversely makes us more unsafe.

Exactly.

Predictions change our expectations about the world if we believe them.

But we have the power to question them.

So if Oedipus had laughed off the prediction that he would marry his mother and murder his father instead of getting scared and trying to run away from it, he wouldn't have made the prediction come true.

Exactly.

So when a tech executive says that we will use his product tomorrow everywhere and for everything, and if you don't, you're going to fall behind the curve, what they're trying to do is to instill in you the fear of missing out so that you will go out and buy that product and fulfill their vision of the future, which also happens to line their pockets.

And instead...

We should realize that no, that the future is unwritten, that nobody knows what it holds, that it's partly up to us to build it.

And that uncertainty is actually very good news, because even though it can be nerve wracking, it also means that we have the power to change the future.

Because if you knew exactly where you would be tomorrow and every day after that, it would mean that you lived in a police state.

Yes, and maybe even a more important distinction is predictions about things and predictions about the social world.

Because if I make a prediction about a molecule, it's not going to change the molecule.

But if I make a prediction about a human being, even if I have good intentions, there's a very high likelihood that it will affect that human being.