Jason Crawford

In terms of accidents, I think that, okay, technology is risky.

So progress is risky in general.

Technology is power and, you know, power can be used for good or evil.

It can be used wisely or foolishly.

It can, and it can, yeah, it can, it can get out of hand.

But not all technology increases risk.

I think maybe technology by default increases risk, or if you're not paying attention to the risk, you know, level over here while you're experimenting over here, you know, maybe the default is for the risk level to go up.

But when we set our attention and deliberately set as a goal to create safety, to reduce risk, we can often do that through safety creating technology.

So not all technology increases risk, even if technology increases risk by default.

Safety technology decreases risk.

And so I think the key question, if we're worried about technology risks in this context, especially in the context of accidents, is how do we make sure that we create safety technologies at an appropriate pace and in an appropriate balance with the risk-creating technologies that we are pursuing?

So if we just blindly pursue more power, more speed, more whatever, and we're not paying attention to the potential risks, then I think we're in a potentially dangerous situation where things are sort of running ahead and we're just kind of like not – we're asleep at the wheel or whatever you want to call it.

But I think if we pay attention to that and we recognize that, you know, as new technologies come along, we need to think about what kind of risk they might create and then put an appropriate amount of resources together.

appropriately early enough into creating safety mechanisms to counter the potential risks, then I think we can continue to move forward with technology and continue to reduce overall risk, you know, for the world as we've been doing over the last couple hundred years.

I think that one thing, so if you look at the history of technology, I think that we have historically not been very good at anticipating risks.

Generally, it's not that we don't worry about new technology.

It's just the things that we worry about are not always very well correlated with the things that turn out to be real problems.

And even when we do anticipate problems or when we could have easily anticipated them, we're not necessarily good at doing something about it ahead of time.

One example is antibiotic resistance.

Alexander Fleming, the microbiologist who discovered the action of the penicillium mold that led to penicillin, the drug, Fleming, early in the antibiotic era, foresaw the potential of antibiotic resistance just on general evolutionary principles.