Modern Worries

Hope is more fragile than fear. Good outcomes often require that many things all go well, while bad outcomes often need only one particular thing to go wrong. But as bad outcomes are rare, if you think about what concretely might happen to you in the next day, hopes and fears are of similar magnitude.

However, as you widen the scope that you consider, both in time and social impact, your fears grow relative to hopes. For the world over the next half century, you have far more fears than hopes.

The more things and processes that you know about that happen in the world, and the more interdependent your world, the more pieces you can combine to create worrisome scenarios. Furthermore, you can build worries from abstract categories of things and processes, even if you don’t understand those well enough to develop specific worry scenarios. So knowing more, including more abstractions, gives you more things to worry about.

The ancient world did have some abstract worries, like gods, but a limited number of them. They knew a limited range of things, understood fewer processes, and were less dependent on one another. So they could not construct as many plausible big scope fears. Today, in contrast, every new tech, product, institution, cognitive bias, or social process that we learn of gives us more ways to construct worrisome scenarios.

Fear of AI today seems near a peak example of this. While very few concrete harms have been realized so far, those who publish words on this topic find it easy to imagine many things to worry about. Often their worries are quite abstract, without much in the way of supporting concrete scenarios to anchor such worries. AI plausibly has the potential to influence everything that matters, and might itself be influenced by a great variety of actors. Yes, all of which might in principle be used to support similarly strong hopes, and investments do reveal great hopes, but most published words are about fears.