CONCEPT
Failure of Nerve
Clarke’s diagnosis of the specific kind of predictive error that refuses to accept that something possible is actually going to happen—the error that produces AI winters, dismissals of transformative technologies, and the expert blindness that his First Law predicts.
The failure of nerve is
Arthur C. Clarke’s name for the predictive error that does not stem from ignorance but from its opposite. In
Profiles of the Future, Clarke identified two distinct ways that technological prediction goes wrong. The first, and more common, is the failure of nerve: the expert who knows the current terrain so thoroughly that the terrain’s edges feel like the edges of the possible, and who therefore refuses to accept that the trajectory of development will reach the destination that physics and engineering logic clearly permit. The authorities who dismissed heavier-than-air flight, X-rays, nuclear energy, and space travel were not foolish; they were expert, and their expertise had hardened into a wall. Clarke’s First Law addresses this failure directly: when a distinguished expert states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong, precisely because his expertise makes the current boundary feel permanent. The second failure is the
failure of