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The techno-realist manifesto
Recognizing horizon bias while making rational decisions to prepare for an intrinsically uncertain future is necessary to avoid seeing technology as a panacea.
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Visitors look at the humanoid robot Optimus displayed on July 5 in the booth of automotive tech company Tesla at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) 2024 in Shanghai, China. (AFP/-)
“It’s actually going to be easy to cure aging and cancer,” insists David Sinclair, a researcher on aging at Harvard University. Similarly, Elon Musk continues to claim that he will soon land humans on Mars and deploy robotaxis en masse.
Major corporations have set carbon-neutrality targets based on highly optimistic forecasts about the potential of carbon-removal technologies. And of course, many commentators now insist that “AI changes everything.”
Amid such a confounding mix of hype and genuine technological marvels, are entrepreneurs, scientists and other experts getting ahead of themselves? At the very least, they betray a strong preference for technological solutions to complex problems, as well as an abiding belief that technological progress will make us healthier, wealthier and wiser.
“Give us a real world problem, and we can invent a technology that will solve it,” writes Silicon Valley doyen Marc Andreesen in “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”.
But as we note in our book, How to Think About Progress, this attitude is heavily influenced by what we call the “horizon bias”: the propensity to believe that anything experts can envisage accomplishing with technology is imminently within reach. We owe this optimism to technology’s past successes: eradicating smallpox, landing a man on the Moon, creating machines that can outperform chess grandmasters and radiologists.
While these highlights dwell permanently in our collective memory, we forget (or are oblivious to) all the times that technology promised to solve some problem, but didn’t. Just as history is written by the victors, the story of technological progress features mainly the breakthroughs that panned out.
The horizon bias affects us all, but it is most consequential in those with enough expertise to be able to offer scientific and technological solutions to big challenges in the first place, especially if they are trying to sell us something.
