A Better Way to Think About Tech

Have you noticed that it's become increasingly hard to talk about technology? I think this is because a lot of commentators have divided themselves into two different groups, both of which can become pretty extreme. Alright? So on one side, we have what we can call the techno pessimist. Now the techno pessimist are worried about the harms that new technologies can cause and the things that we value that new technologies might make go away. I think the the classic example of techno pessimism would be the Luddite movement from the early eighteen hundreds who are worried about new automated manufacturing technologies like the steam loom and their input on artisan crafts. They felt really strongly about this. I have a letter here from 1812 written by members of the movement and signed by the the sort of fictional creation of general Ludd. And in this letter, they said they would rather die than see their children, which they called your neighboring fellow creatures, starve because hand weavers were gonna be put out of business. Now the thing about techno pessimists is that they're often right in the sense that the harms they're worried about are real, and they are harmful, and they do hurt. The issue with the techno pessimist is that sometimes we have to go through short term pain to get to long term innovation that ends up making everybody's lives better. If we go back to the Luddite movement, let's zoom out to the industrial revolution writ large. And what we see is, yes, for a lot of professions, the industrial revolution was very painful in the moment. Technopessimists of the time were right, but the industrial revolution also delivered essentially all of the wealth on which the modern world was built. We would not actually wanna be living in a world today in which the industrial revolution never happened. Okay. On the other extreme, we have what we can call the techno optimist who really don't care about short term harms or things we could lose in the... In right now, things we already value because they are often in love with this vision of some sort of much better future that the technology will deliver, and the short term cost in their mind is always worth it. This can get to pretty unnerving places. Like, let me play you a clip here. This is Elon Musk talking to Peter Diamandis about humankind and superintelligent AI. I mean, several years ago, I said humans are the biological bootloader for digital superintelligence. Yes. We are a transitional we are a transitional species. We're bootloader. Yeah. We're a bootloader. So what they're saying in this clip is that humans right now are essentially what they called biological bootloaders. Basically, just a step that gets us to the technological utopia they really care about, which is one in which we have a super intelligent AI that delivers us some sort of mystical world where, you know, everyone …