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Make things better by making better things.
The fear and optimism around AI often stem from two extreme worldviews.
On one side are the doomsters, who seem to have lost complete faith in humanity. On the other are technological optimists, who believe all of humanity’s problems are on the verge of being solved and that we are entering an unprecedented era of wealth and prosperity.
Both extremes make totalizing predictions that remove responsibility. Both are escapes from the harder middle position: we don’t actually know what will happen next.
People want deterministic outcomes because certainty lets us off the hook. Uncertainty is precisely what compels us to act on the future.
No one has a crystal ball. The question is not whether AI will be good or bad in some final, total sense, but what we choose to do with the range of possibilities in between.