Joel Pearson

Like science moves, yes, sometimes fast, but mostly pretty slowly.

You get a government grant that might take a year or so or two.

Then you have a couple of years to do the research.

Then you start publishing the papers.

And in AI time, that's like three or four years.

The whole world's different by then.

And so that's why I kind of shifted to this mode where I'm trying to make logical, sensible predictions about the future based on what we do know about the mind, psychology, and the brain, about how all this change is going to affect us and what we can do about it.

So we've done some modeling.

Typically, people model sort of depression, anxiety, and how that might relate to unemployment just one thing at a time.

So there's data showing that, yes, unemployment is linked to anxiety, depression, substance abuse, suicide.

But all those things actually interact with themselves as well.

So as anxiety goes up, you think about it, if you model it, there's a sort of a negative impact.

forces the others to go up as well.

And that also then makes unemployment go up more.

So it's like you get this sort of dark spiraling effect and the faster unemployment would go up, the faster this would spiral.

And you can sort of, if you model it out,

The point is not to come up with, you know, accurate numbers, but to see this, sort of get a feeling for the dynamics here.

So we imagine that sort of unemployment starts going up 10, 20, 30%, and you start to see, yes, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, suicide, loss of purpose, which is linked to all those things as well, goes up.

And all those things sort of have a negative effect on all the other things.

So it accelerates more quickly than just the speed of unemployment going up.