Despite an abundance of horrible episodes in human history, I will always believe that one of our greatest, most magical impulses is our insatiable curiosity and our desire to innovate. We try things, not carefully and methodically, but haphazardly. Sometimes things work out. Sometimes they don’t. But they always change us as a species. In many ways, human history can be viewed as a long series of great uncontrolled experiments.
The first of these experiments was migration. A quarter million years ago, perhaps twenty thousand Homo Sapiens inhabited the plains of East Africa. None of them knew what lay beyond the Red Sea, or the Mediterranean Sea, or the Asian steppes, or millennia later the Arafura Sea, the Bering Strait, or the vast expanses of the western Pacific. They certainly didn’t know how those new environments would shape their descendants socially and physically. It was an uncontrolled experiment.
Some ten thousand years ago, as the most recent glacial period was drawing to a close, we began another great uncontrolled experiment: the agricultural revolution, which forged the underpinnings of virtually everything we associate with modern civilization. Cities, trade, and specialization of labour completely restructured society. None of the people who first domesticated barley in the soils of Mesopotamia could have conceived of the long-term consequences.
More recently, we’ve had an industrial revolution, replacing manual labour with machines offering orders of magnitude more power. We’ve had a digital revolution, harnessing the power of silicon to speed our work by factors of a million. Through immigration we’ve brought diverse people together to study in the same schools, work in the same factories, eat each other’s cuisine, and start families together. None of these great uncontrolled experiments had knowable outcomes, but we did it anyhow because you know, humans.
By any standard, these experiments have been staggering successes. We have built an advanced technological civilization able to unravel the mysteries of the universe and literally re-shape the world around us.
And that’s the problem.
As our powers have grown, the stakes in the giant uncontrolled experiments lottery have grown from “a band of 200 settlers lost at sea in a storm” to “global temperatures are 1.6C above pre-industrial levels and rising fast.” Pumping 1200 gigatons (and counting) of excess carbon into the atmosphere wasn’t something anyone planned to do, but we did it anyhow because you know, humans.
Social media exploded onto the scene in the mid 2000’s. It has reshaped our discourse, our politics, our news, and our very perception of reality. Nobody planned to monetize attention and fragment societies, but we did it anyhow because you know, humans.
And now here we are at the dawn of the AI era, and by “dawn of the AI era” I mean the era in which AI will fundamentally restructure everything we do and everything we know. We’ve been nibbling at the margins for about a decade. The decade ahead is when things get very confusing, very fast, for a very large segment of society. Fast is the operative word here. Human migration to the furthest corners of the globe took more than 200,000 years. Agriculture rewrote the rules over a span of maybe 5,000 years. The Industrial Revolution played out over a couple centuries. It took around 40 years for climate change to morph from abstraction to wildfire-fleeing, floodplain-abandoning, insurance-premium-skyrocketing reality.
My guess? The LLM-fuelled AI revolution plays out over half a decade. This giant uncontrolled experiment will run hot and run fast.