🔮 Expected and Unexpected →
March 6, 2025 • #Some technologies are unpredicted, but evolve. Others are predicted don’t seem to materialize (or not yet). Then there are those that are expected AND appear. The unexpected tend to be the most disruptive — no one’s had the chance to prepare.
But the expected, if they do finally arrive, have been ruminated on for a long time. When we eventually realize the expected, we’re more prepared socially for their impacts. Though often we’re wrong about their societal impacts until they show up.
Kevin Kelly writes about this in the context of AI, a technology long-predicted, but always with a bent toward the negative. Toward the destructive social consequences of creating artificial beings.
Artificial beings – robots, AI – are in the Expected category. They have been so long anticipated that there has been no other technology or invention as widely or thoroughly anticipated before it arrived as AI. What invention might even be second to AI in terms of anticipation? Flying machines may have been longer desired, but there was relatively little thought put into imagining what their consequences might be. Whereas from the start of the machine age, humans have not only expected intelligent machines, but have expected significant social ramifications from them as well. We’ve spent a full century contemplating what robots and AI would do when it arrived. And, sorry to say, most of our predictions are worrisome.
Here’s the example list from Arthur C. Clarke’s 1963 book, Profiles of the Future:
