✨😨 How AI anxiety threatens a new age of progress

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:

The recent Chinese cyberattack, one enabled by Anthropic’s AI coding tool, suggests why my Up Wing-Down Wing framing matters. An Up Wing mindset is vital because modern technologies in all their wondrous complexity — artificial intelligence, nuclear power, spaceflight, bioscience — depend as much on public consent as on clever engineering. A society steeped in future pessimism will withdraw this “social licence” when troubles come.

And troubles, inevitably, will come. Cyberattacks will proliferate.Nuclear plants will suffer accidents. Rockets will occasionally malfunction. A promising CRISPR trial may be halted after, say, an unexpected immune response or some such.

A technophobic Down Wing country responds to such episodes with paralysis or even retreat, as seen with America’s breakup with nuclear power after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. A tech-optimistic Up Wing country treats these events more like feedback — an impetus to improve and keep building. Without that pro-progress cultural bias, the very innovations needed to deliver greater wealth, health, and resilience risk being throttled before they can bloom.

(As Dutch futurist Frederick Polak famously put it, any culture “turning aside from its own heritage of positive visions of the future, or actively at work in changing these positive visions into negative ones, has no future.”)1

So where is America’s head right now? Are we tilting more toward risk aversion or risk acceptance when it comes to disruptive technology and disruptive public policy with pro-growth potential?

Read more