It’s spring again, so I bought a book called Global Catastrophic Risks. It’s not the right book for the season but I’m compelled to read it because it cost so much. It’s thick and scientific with a Bruegel painting on the cover, one of those 16th-century scenes with a lot of small figures, heads shaped like moles.

It’s also the first spring we haven’t had to think about Covid since 2019. But I am not skipping through the daisies, I’m feeling a different kind of uncertainty now.

Of the global catastrophic risks pandemics rank pretty high. Comets, nuclear wars, even “super intelligence” makes the list. That’s why I bought the book, because I thought it was all about technology, but AI is just one of many risks.

I don’t like to think of myself as someone who dwells on bad things. But that’s probably a bias that prevents me from seeing myself clearly. The book covers a lot about biases, it seems there are hundreds, and it’s no wonder we humans can’t agree because we all see and think about things differently.

Where we live, Covid doesn’t make the news much anymore. It’s been replaced by AI, layoffs in the tech sector, failing banks, and basketball.

This week OpenAI released the next generation of their chatbot engine GPT-4, and Microsoft announced a new Office product called Copilot that uses technology similar to ChatGPT called natural language processing, or prompts. You type in what you want it to do (like, what trends are you seeing across this Excel sheet?) and it spits back results. It infers what you want and works across massive data sets to produce it.

People are going bananas over the Microsoft announcement, with more than a million views on YouTube and soaring stock prices. It promises to “take the drudgery out of work” and “return the joy and creativity to work.” That may be true. I guess we’ll see!

Despite what you think about AI, one thing we can probably agree on is the level of uncertainty it creates. Not as much the science fiction aspect (robots taking over), but what’s happening in the short term and how it’s moving so fast.

The speed it’s taking off and evolving resembles the pandemic for me. In this way, AI is the ultimate news story because it affects all of us and every day there’s something new. The news could be promising, could be deadly, no one knows! We’ve likely made up our minds already based on our biases.

One bias I’ve got is the optimist bias, the one that thinks “I’m sure everything will be fine.” That’s what prevents me from stocking up on canned foods and bottled water in the case of an earthquake or extended power outage. They say you should keep a lot of small bills on hand for when the payment systems go down and we have to revert to cash. I just can’t think that way, even though I probably should. Because thinking that way allows for the possibility it could be true.

Then there’s the anchoring bias, another one I’ve got in spades, where you pivot too hard on the most recent thing you’ve heard to inform your thinking. The little bit of knowledge I’ve collected on AI is making me feel like an expert in an area I don’t know much about. But it’s not stopping me from talking about it. And that’s probably another bias, the jackass bias.

I was born in 1970 so I’ve only seen a couple catastrophes first hand. There was 9/11 and a 6.8 earthquake in Seattle that same year, both of which made me think for the first time I could die. In the case of the earthquake, I crouched under my work desk as things broke around me and the building shook (I was on the eighth floor and the building was almost one hundred years old). It was nothing like the earthquakes that recently hit Turkey and Syria of course, nothing like the earthquakes most of us never hear about. Except for this one, I was there.

The pandemic gave most everyone a similar feeling: this thing I can’t see, which could be anywhere, might creep into my nose and kill me. It could strike at anytime. We all responded in different ways, and our biases informed our actions and beliefs based on what we read and heard, what we wanted to believe.

These moments shock us into the reality of what it means to truly live and die. Most days we don’t go there, it would be too bleak. Our biases protect us from the awful truth that one day our lives will end: how it ends is uncertain, but it’s likely not good. If you want certainty, you can have that: we’re all going to die!

I think this is why we have entertainment and sports, drugs and alcohol and kids and spring, pets, comedy, the travel industry: to distract us from the truth that one day the world will end.

That one day is in a far-off future none of us will live to see, if we’re lucky. The truth is abstracted and we’re probably better as a result. Happier, at least.

Categories: musings, technology, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, existentialism, humor