There’s an argument I sometimes hear against existential risks, or any other putative change that some are worried about, that goes something like this:
‘We’ve seen time after time that some people will be afraid of any change. They’ll say things like “TV will destroy people’s ability to read”, “coffee shops will destroy the social order”,”machines will put textile workers out of work”. Heck, Socrates argued that books would harm people’s ability to memorize things. So many prophets of doom, and yet the world has not only survived, it has thrived. Innovation is a boon. So we should be extremely wary when someone cries out “halt” in response to a new technology, as that path is lined with skulls of would be doomsayers.”
Lest you think this is a straw man, Yann Le Cun compared fears about AI doom to fears about coffee. Now, I don’t want to criticize this argument, like Scott Alexander did. Neither do I want to argue for it, like Daniel Jeffries did. Instead, I want to point out something very interesting about all the examples my sock-puppet gave.
The doomers were right.
TV, and the internet, did destroy people’s ability to read complex works. Coffee shops were in fact breeding grounds for revolution which destroyed the social order. Machines did put textile workers out of work. Books did reduce elite human’s ability to recite epic poems at a whim, and generally devalue memorization. All of these things are true.
This goes beyond technology. Consider sexuality. People warned that permitting homosexuality would be a slippery slope to all sorts of degenerate sexualities. Can anyone reading this truly deny that those warnings came true from the doom sayer’s perspective?
Likewise for marriage. We made divorce easier, stopped shaming single mothers, viewing children with divorced parents as coming from broken homes, and we saw the divorce rate skyrocket. Factually, did those who warned of such things turn out to be wrong?
Or, say, D&D. People had a moral panic over it, viewing it as a gateway to fraternizing with devils. Heck, Tolkien wrote about Satanic cults in the 4th Age after Sauron’s defeat, and how “Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs”. But who now would blink at a devil or an orc for a hero?
The slippery slope arguments were correct.
Historical doomers did a better job at predicting real dangers from change than your average SF-thinkboy will assume.
But! They were not wholly correct. And that matters, of course. Take the Tolkien quote from above. It conveniently missed out an important bit of context at the “and going around doing damage.“ Books, looms, coffee shops, TV, gay marriage, accepting single moms and D&D did not actually have all the dangers that people warned of, true.
In fact, they had a great deal of benefits. So many that they were worth it on net, in my view. We would not have got anywhere without books, really. (Cue applause lights.) So it is unsurprising that, in retrospect, people will view a heuristic like “new tech is always good”. Or even that a rock with that heuristic slapped onto it is a good though leader. You could do worse.
But there are two important caveats. First, note the usage of “in my view”. Probably the ancients would see our lives as greatly impoverished in many ways downstream of the innovations they warned against. We do not recite poetry as we once used to, sing together for entertainment, roam alone as children, or dance freely in the presence of the internet’s all-seeing eyes. Less sympathetic would be ancient’s sadness at our sexual deviances, casual blasphemy or so on. But those were their values.
Which brings us to the second point. In spite of the predictions of great ruin by our ancestors, much ruin did happen. Down the slopes we did slip.
Of course, they got a lot of details wrong. And many times, people operated more on vibes than concrete models of what would occur. Partly this was because they didn’t just base their predictions on their inner simulators guessing what would concretely happen, but also on abstract idealized reasoning which naturally got corrupted by far-mode considerations of the sacred. So instead of predictions like “coffee shops will ferment rebels”, we got “coffee shops will destroy society”. And we did get some social destruction, but not as much as they expected. And we got benefits, perhaps more than they expected.
But even given all that, it’s remarkable to me how right the doomers were.
people are fraternizing with devils