surviving technological adolescence
While in New York for Climate Week, I watched the 1997 alien movie Contact with a friend.1 I also watched Independence Day on the plane. I can’t find this now, but I saw an interesting point somewhere about the rise of alien movies in the late 1990s after the end of the Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, before 9/11, as an era with no major foreign enemies, so the enemy in movies became aliens. Interviewed by an international panel deciding who to send in the alien machine, Jodie Foster’s character Dr. Ellie Arroway is asked what question she’d ask the aliens. She replies, “How did you do it, how did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?”
I first heard about the idea that intelligent civiligations don’t survive developing the technology to destroy themselves as solution to the Fermi paradox in an interview with the physicist Brian Cox. 2 Explained well as Great Filter Ahead of Us by Tim Urban in The Fermi Paradox. The concept of surviving technological adolescence has been echoing in my head ever since. I think it’s such a useful frame for the time in which I’m alive.
Humanity has this very new3 relative to the history of humanity, awesome power in our technological capabilities - illumination, vaccines to prevent disease, refrigeration, the electric grid, engines for cars, trains, planes, nuclear fission4 fusion coming soon?, computers, semiconductors, the internet, gene editing, and now artificial intelligence, likely soon complemented by widespread robotics.
Our culture struggles to keep pace. We narrowly made it through the development of nuclear weapons without apocalyptic outcomes.5 but still with terrible consequences with more than 150,000 deaths in the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki We are making slow but meaningful progress abating global climate change. Depending on who you ask, we are either entering a period of unprecedented abundance or the potential extinction of humanity caused by AI. 6 Often these takes are coming from the same people. Dario Amodei also has an essay framed around technological adolescence quoting Jodie Foster’s character in Contact.
Culture building feels so urgent. I use culture here broadly. We need political systems that enable long-term thinking about problems that extend beyond national borders. We need economic systems built for the coming turbulence in the relations of labor and capital as core inputs in a world with advanced AI and robotics. We need new stories that ground our morality, that tell us who we are and what we owe to each other. The core challenge of my lifetime is building culture that allows humanity to use our incredible technology for collective benefit.
I want to expand this piece at some point in the future.