The capability–understanding gap
Capability and understanding do not grow together. Capability comes first — it is easier to verify, to sell and to see. The distance between them behaves like debt: the later you take it up, the more it costs.
Capability is what we are able to do. Understanding is knowledge of what we are working with, how it is put together, and what will change as a result of our actions. Complex behaviour in an artificial system and an account of the nature of consciousness are different achievements; neither guarantees the other.
A difference in tempo is natural. It becomes critical where one field needs knowledge another has not yet produced: medicine needs a biological mechanism, energy needs new materials, society needs an understanding of how its own institutions act. Such dependencies have to be established case by case.
What we want
Synchronism begins in enthusiasm. Artificial intelligence, genome editing, engineered bodies, radical life extension — all of it is good news to us, and we want there to be more of it.
The subject of our attention is unevenness. Humanity has built a powerful machine for producing capability: universities, markets, venture capital, corporate laboratories. Consciousness, morality, personhood and institutions are studied too — and have been for a long time — but at a scale incommensurate with what that study is meant to serve. One flies; the other goes on foot.
We want the rest of civilisation to learn to keep up with progress — and then to accelerate together with it.
The search has to be permanent. Today it is philosophy, ethics and neuroscience that go on foot; in a hundred years it will be something else we cannot name now.
When the gap accrues a cost
A deferred question can return after infrastructure, rules and economic interests have already been built around the technology. Revising it then takes more effort. We call this possible effect civilizational debt.
Debt here is an analogy: it describes the direction of the effect, while the size has to be measured separately. Sometimes early knowledge is not available and practice itself supplies the data. The task is to tell productive learning-by-doing apart from expensive deferral of research that could have been done.
A civilisation’s ability to understand its own power should grow together with that power.
Where to look for the gap
- Artificial intelligence
- Powerful systems raise questions about experience and moral standing. The corpus has an initial case on the scale of funding, but it does not yet establish a global ratio between investment in AI and research into consciousness.
- Biology
- New ways of intervening in heredity require knowledge of consequences and a justification for decisions about future beings. That a principle of dignity is old is not by itself evidence that it is obsolete.
- Personhood
- Imagined scenarios of a changeable body let us test what we take the basis of personhood to be. It is a way of examining a concept before the capability arrives.
- Institutions
- When the conditions of life change, there is reason to revisit the functions of marriage, education and other institutions. Whether rebuilding is needed has to be shown by analysing their purpose and effects.
What unites these examples is the question of how far development depends on missing knowledge. Their causes may differ: incentives, the difficulty of the subject, a shortage of data, of instruments, or of cooperation between disciplines.
Accelerating what is short
The practical proposal is simple: find the critical lags, direct attention, talent and resources there, and check the result. Complete understanding before every action is unreachable and unnecessary — practice supplies part of the knowledge itself. A justified choice of the next piece of research is entirely possible, and making that choice is the work of synchronism.