The Imperfectionist: The end isn't nigh
The Imperfectionist: The end isn't nigh
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The end isn't nigh<br>I feel the need to issue a public service announcement, to try to alleviate some of the extreme anxiety I keep encountering in people, and sometimes feel in myself: it is very, very, very, very unlikely that the literal apocalypse is coming anytime soon. We’re almost certainly not living at the end of human civilisation. Frankly, it’s pretty unlikely we’re even on the cusp of unprecedented levels of disruptive change. I’m bracing myself for hostile reactions here – and I promise this isn’t one of those pieces about how you should just chill out, because statistics show everything’s going great – but the truth is that we’re probably living through times that future historians will think of as broadly normal. Dangerous and consequential, yes, but still normal.<br>The loudest counterpoint to this argument is the daily scolding I receive about how it’s time to pull my head out of the sand, or from some other place, and accept the fact that artificial intelligence is about to destroy all jobs, or destroy humanity, or at any rate propel us over a threshold into a completely unrecognisable future. But my main argument here isn’t about AI or any other potential cause of disaster. It’s that it’s incredibly hard, and maybe impossible, to escape the distorted perspective that’s been labelled “temporal chauvinism”: the feeling that the time you’re living in now is the most significant or terrifying one ever – simply because it’s the one you happen to be around to experience.<br>Everything about our situation as humans pushes us to overrate the importance of our own era. Apart from anything else, present-day unknowns feel the scariest, because all previous unknowns eventually resolved themselves into knowns (every prior prediction of the end of the world turned out to be wrong) while future ones haven’t occurred to us yet. This bias is so foundational that as a general rule of thumb, I’d say, any essay or book making a “maximalist” case for AI ought to dedicate roughly 50% of its wordcount to explaining why this thinker’s views are likely to be immune from it. Instead, it only gets mentioned in passing, or frequently not at all.<br>It’s often been said that you can view human history as an ongoing process of dethronement. Copernicus taught us we aren’t the centre of the universe; Darwin made us see we’re just one more part of the animal kingdom; and Freud’s work on the unconscious showed we’re not even masters of our own minds. Yet this sense of being temporally at the centre of things feels very hard to dislodge. Looking back at previous figures who predicted the apocalypse, it’s difficult not to think of them as somehow a bit stupid, unlike us. But consider, say, the astrologers whose predictions of world-ending floods in 1524 caused thousands of Londoners to flee for higher ground; or the Joachimites, rogue 13th-century Franciscans who rattled off various predictions of the end of the world like Elon Musk chuntering about building colonies on Mars in the next few years, or the next, or the next. There wasn’t some little part of their brains that was thinking “I know I’m being superstitious here – it’ll be different in the future, when people aren’t so ignorant!” As far as they knew, they were in possession of the facts; they surely felt just as secure in their convictions as any AI thought leader today.<br>And yet if I’m being honest, all this AI talk is a bit of a dodge. In my circles, it feels far more taboo, and far more likely to give offence, to wonder if climate change, too, might fall into this category of being a serious threat yet not the end of the world. So I was grateful to find this post by Misha Glouberman, in which he makes a good case for contemplating the possibility that the climate crisis might be something really bad in the same way that global poverty, famine, cancer or deaths from smoking are really bad – not something belonging to a wholly different and cataclysmic order of things. Glouberman...