Idea · 7 pages
Idea
Humanity gains new power before it works out what that power now affects. The seven pages below explain where this gap comes from, why it reproduces itself, and what we propose to do about it.
- 01The capability–understanding gapCapability and understanding do not grow together. Capability comes first — it is easier to verify, to sell and to see. The distance between them is not a catastrophe, but it behaves like debt: the later you take it up, the more it costs.
- 02Progress as an uneven systemProgress joins the development of knowledge, technology, the human being, society and institutions. An achievement in one field opens possibilities in others and changes what they are missing. Priorities therefore have to move along with the results.
- 03Why understanding is underfundedThe gap is nobody’s negligence. It is the predictable consequence of how incentives are arranged: knowledge that turns into a product is funded differently from knowledge that turns into nothing but a refinement.
- 04Category decompositionMost of our moral concepts describe not one property but a bundle of properties that, in ordinary conditions, almost always travel together. While the bundle holds, the concept works and seems fundamental. Technology can pull it apart — and then it turns out the concept was holding several different things at once.
- 05What closing gaps is forMore knowledge, more capability, more autonomy, more freedom to choose the shape of one’s own life — and a better understanding of the consequences of one’s own power. Gaps are worth closing for that, not for the sake of caution.
- 06Philosophy has a job againThe twenty-first century has produced a large class of questions with real consequences that philosophy has been working on for a long time — and almost entirely out of contact with the people who decide about the technologies themselves. Someone with philosophical training can be not a commentator on these questions but one of those who carries an answer through to a decision.
- 07What this is notSynchronism has many neighbours, and the first sensible question from an informed reader is how it differs from what already exists. Below are honest answers, including the cases where the difference is smaller than we would like.