The Coming Tech Explosion
Critical points to think about the future of technology
Hello reader,
We’re living in an era unlike any other in the past.
Technology is developing at an exponential pace. It’s so fast, that nobody knows what exactly is happening- and it’s even harder to predict the 2nd order consequences.
And it’s not just AI. Advances in synthetic biology (gene editing), 3D printing, and other areas mean that we’re unleashing a combination of extremely powerful new general-purpose technologies without any clue of what they’ll lead to. It’s like entering a physics board exam when all you’ve studied is 2 pages of geography.
While it may sound exciting, some of the implications are so scary I shit my pants reading about them.
What are the characteristics of the coming tech explosion that we should think deeply about? Here are some important ones:
The Containment Problem: With an explosion in these new technologies, we’re essentially pushing the cost of using them downward. Soon, anyone would be able to use an AI to access and develop new software or get a gene editing kit to engineer new forms of life. Thus, we’ll soon be giving every individual the power to harness them- but they can also be used for programming killer drones or producing new pathogens (even if accidentally) that might cause deadly pandemics. How can we prevent such deadly usage of these new technologies? In other words, how we can contain them and ensure they’re used for purposes that don’t cause harm?
Humans vs unstoppable technology Unstoppable Technologies: History shows that states may try to ban new tech but this isn’t sustainable, and you can’t reverse the proliferation of new tech by brute force. The Ottoman Empire tried banning the printing press in the 16th Century but that was as effective as banning porn in an engineering college- it became commonplace 300 years later. China tried to keep silk-making tech a secret but it ultimately got out thanks to 2 monks in 552 AD. Tech is fundamentally a bunch of ideas- and ideas can’t be eliminated or stopped from spreading. Societies that purposely restricted tech dev ultimately collapsed.
Unstoppable Incentives: But what if we all came together and decided to take a pause and think through this before engaging in faster development? That’s not possible for a bunch of reasons. One, tech drives geopolitics, and every tech edge becomes a factor that raises one nation’s comparative power. Two, there’s immense money to be made by being the first to develop these, so that’s going to make corporations only push harder to develop them. And finally, researchers & entrepreneurs are driven as much by fame and glory for building something historic. All of these ensure that even if all these ideas may cause massive upheaval, nobody’s interested in taking a pause.
Nuclear parallel: Are there any potentially harmful technologies that humanity has successfully managed to contain? Nuclear weapons come close. Thanks to a combination of intense global cooperation/treaties to reduce usage and restrict proliferation and the horror caused by their devastating potential, we’ve managed to somewhat contain nuclear tech. But the gigantic investment needs & ultra-complex tech ensure that the costs of developing this don’t fall over time ala Moore’s Law, and have been a further help in preventing cost reduction and the consequent spread. The same can’t be said of AI and syn-bio. Further, 4 particular features will make the coming wave harder to contain. They’re as follows:
Asymmetry: When autonomous drones become cheap enough, even a rogue group can program them to wreak havoc on civilian targets- but the costs of nullifying such a threat are extremely high. Similarly, a lunatic may engineer a new virus in his garage when gene editing kits become easily accessible. As we’ve already seen, such a spread can bring not just a city but the entire world to its knees. The impact of these new technologies will be highly asymmetric- easy to build something, but creating massively disproportionate consequences.
Hyper Evolution: The 2nd feature is that they’re evolving at a breakneck pace- so fast that we won’t have enough time to build regulations and safeguards to mitigate their harms. When cars came, we got a century to understand the risks and build out road safety regulations, laws, seat belts & helmets, traffic rules and so much of the other infra. And still, we have to contend with >1M road accident deaths per year. Imagine what’ll happen when a new tech proliferates but we don’t even have 10% of this time to develop ideas on how we’ll deal with the dangers!
Omni-use: As pointed out in the 1st point itself, while these ideas can unleash massive levels of productivity & efficiency, they can also be used for negative purposes. The tools for new drug discovery can also used to come up with new poisons or nerve gases. This is further compounded by the unpredictability of the uses for which people will deploy them. The image of these things in the hands of terror groups & misanthropes is enough to tell you what the issue is.
Autonomy: The final and unique feature of this wave is autonomy. For the first time, we have tech that can rapidly iterate & improve itself. A car or a plane or steam engines didn’t have this capability. But AI systems will. So far, all these tools required humans to do the “doing”- but now we have things that can independently do stuff & make decisions without requiring a human for supervision or decision-making. This, coupled with the fact that we don’t even know how they work or make decisions, should give us pause to think about how this autonomy might evolve, and what happens when its goals don’t align with ours.
If containment is so hard and the threat posed by the rapid development is so big, what’s our way out here?
It is a tricky problem, and we’ve already let the genie out of the bottle so there’s no going back.
However, there are some approaches, which will require global cooperation to execute if we have to take containment seriously. I’ll cover them in a follow-up post.
This isn’t just about wealth or productivity. If we eff this up, our civilizational continuity may be at stake- which is why having this conversation matters.
And remember- this isn’t fear-mongering for clicks. It’s genuinely important for these discussions to be had by the common folk instead of them being driven purely by boardrooms.
After all, we don’t want these to be the last technologies we develop.
Thanks for tuning in! If you enjoyed this, share it with that friend who thinks technology can solve everything and we have nothing to worry about.
And if you have any thoughts on this, please respond to the email, I’d love to have a discussion.
For more juicy articles on the past & future of technology, check out the following:
The Exponential Age [Related to this article]
Mind-Boggling Ideas About Modern Work [Very Popular]