- The New Rules with Alan Pentz
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- The Safety Trap
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I was struck this week by a post from the writer, Richard Hanania, in which he linked our worries about sports gambling with our inability to get to Mars. He wrote:
Those of us who believe in progress have an important mission, which is to convince elites that they’re too neurotic, worried about theoretical harms, and willing to err on the side of caution in situations where they more often need to get out of the way. If they don’t even have the stomach to let fools blow their money on football, consider how they can be expected to react when faced with the prospects of nuclear meltdowns or exploding spaceships. While there’s little directly at stake in the question of whether sports betting should be legal, the principle involved is fundamental in determining what kind of civilization we aspire towards.
Hanania is (as usual) being deliberately provocative to make a point: our obsession with safety-ism prevents progress. Safety-ism is a term that was coined in the book, The Coddling of the American Mind. Safety is a natural human desire. Safety-ism is a condition in which that desire has been allowed to out weigh any other consideration often for minimal benefit. In its worst form, safety-ism tends to avoid short-term discomforts while causing substantial long-term harms. For example, protecting your child from the emotional distress of failing on a sports team or in school can create a fragile adult who can’t manage his own life.
Safety-ism is particularly pronounced when the future is involved. The essential problem is that the future isn’t at the table but the harms of today are. Since there is no interest group to make the case, we default to allowing the harms of the day to win no matter how small or remote. Virginia Postrel made a similar point in her 1999 book, The Future and Its Enemies.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regularly has this problem. The FDA delays pharmaceuticals with clear benefits because of regulation and excessive caution. Yes, some people might have bad outcomes or die because a treatment was released early, but many times that number might die because it wasn’t released. We tend to default to causing no harm rather than focusing on the potential benefits-even if those benefits far outweigh the harm.
Humans crave certainty and many of us will choose the bird in the hand over the two in the bush any day. We fear progress. Just look at the ways that science fiction always seems to depict technology as the cause of some future dystopia rather than as something to wonder at and look forward to.
Why Do We Fear the Future?
Why do we fear the future? Why do we block progress on beneficial technologies?
I’d invert the question and instead ask, “Why don’t we prevent all progress?”
If our natural tendency is to prefer safety over progress, why do we get technological progress? After all, humans lived for several millennia with limited population growth and an average life expectancy of 35. That was the norm. Why did it suddenly change in 18th/19th Century Britain and then all over the world with the advent of the Industrial Revolution?
Do We Need Fear and Conflict?
My theory is that humans need some sort of forcing function to get over their fears of the future. Another way to put it is we need to be afraid enough of a problem in the present to risk creating a problem in the future.
Many of our most important technological achievements were either developed or accelerated based on a potential or real conflict. The airplane was boosted by the world wars, the computer and semi-conductors were accelerated by defense spending to beat the Nazis and then the Soviets.
Space flight came out of rocketry which was driven by Nazi scientists trying to win World War Two. It’s no coincidence that the US and Soviets rushed to grab all the Nazi scientists working on that program in the aftermath of the war. Those same scientists proved critical in the US space program.
Space is an interesting example. We poured tons of resources into several programs to get the US into space, particularly after the Soviets launched the satellite Sputnik. We even got to the moon. However, as soon as it became clear the Soviets couldn’t afford to compete anymore, we let our program atrophy and move into maintenance mode.
The AI Example
I see a similar dynamic playing out with AI. One of the key enablers of AI is electricity. It takes a lot of power to run robust AI models at scale. In the absence of the threat China poses, I think the US would probably throttle AI progress by preventing an increase in electricity supply. Our regulatory and NIMBY apparatus would mire every project focused on increasing power capacity in endless studies and delays. It would probably delay AI progress by decades.
We’d also prioritize distant fears of all powerful AI dominating the world over allowing the technology to develop outside of regulatory constraints. Instead, I think the threat of China leaping ahead of us on AI and the accompanying economic and military implications will inspire us to accelerate power generation and accelerate AI research with a minimum of regulatory burdens. My bet is that the fear of China will finally break through our environmental industrial complex.
In other words, the real threat of China will allow us to realize the potential of AI technology. In the absence of that threat, that progress wouldn’t happen.
Europe is taking the opposite approach and I see the lack of conflict as enabling it. China doesn’t seem to pose that much of a threat to Europe. To the extent it does, they are used to relying on the US to deal with it for them, so the status quo forces can prevail. Just like the US space program.
The Great Stagnation
When I was researching this piece, I remembered a short book called, The Great Stagnation, by the economist, Tyler Cowen. Written in 2011, the book’s thesis was that the rate of growth and productivity in the US economy began to stagnate in the 1970s. He believed the many of the forces that had driven American innovation: open land and the move to the West, increased education, key technological developments like electricity, large-scale immigration, use of fossil fuels, etc. had petered out by then.
The rate of innovation began to slow and the costs increase. Recently Cowen has speculated that the stagnation might be over. He sees new general purpose technologies taking hold: AI, green energy, and bio-technology that can move us radically forward.
I think the first time I heard him say that he was wondering if the stagnation was over was in the immediate aftermath of the adoption of the Covid mRNA vaccine. Here was a vaccine developed using a new platform (mRNA) deployed in a year rather than the ten everyone else predicted. That is progress!
I would point out that Cowen’s great stagnation roughly approximates the era spanning from the end of the Cold War until the pandemic. Is it possible that in the absence of a real enemy that the US allowed safety-ism to take over? Did the lack of conflict lead to stagnation?
However, it was the pandemic and not a military conflict that ended the stagnation. Additionally Cowen points out that the US grew rapidly by pushing West without major wars or pandemic level events so I think it makes sense to update the thesis. Rapid progress requires at least one of three circumstances:
A conflict with an enemy1 that presents an existential challenge. Fighting a war in Iraq doesn’t count. Iraq had no ability to threaten the existence of the US. The enemy needs to be a potential global competitor like Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, or China.
A catastrophe that impacts all of society. Here I’d point to the Great Depression and the pandemic. Even the Great Financial Crisis didn’t seem like a big enough event to spur action.
Low hanging fruit. As Cowen points out, if there are endless acres of fertile land to the west, people are going to move into them without needing much motivation. It’s true that the US had to fight wars with Native Americans to clear the land but these were relatively minor in cost and scope for the US.
This reality isn’t ideal. Who wants to stoke conflict and wait for global pandemics to get significant technical progress? I wish we could make reasoned arguments and get results but the evidence suggests this isn’t enough. It’s only in these extreme circumstances that you can overcome the objections of the safetyists.
I guess the consolation is that in the aftermath of these terrible events, we’ll get progress that makes billions of lives better far out into the future. Humans are a strange species.
Keep learning,
Alan
P.S.
1 Let’s hope these are “cold” conflicts and not hot wars.
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