CONCEPT
Paleolithic Emotions, Medieval Institutions, Godlike Technology
Wilson's 2009 diagnosis of the human predicament as a <em>collision of three timescales in a single species</em> — the single most precise description of the AI crisis yet formulated.
In 2009, at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Wilson was asked about the environmental dangers facing humanity and delivered the sentence that has become his most quoted: 'The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous.' Three layers. Three timescales. One species. The emotions evolved over two hundred thousand years for an environment that no longer exists. The institutions crystallized between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries for coordination problems that have since transformed. The technology changes on timescales of months. And the gap between the capability and the capacity to comprehend it widens with every iteration.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The emotions are old. When a notification pings and adrenaline rises before any conscious evaluation, the circuitry firing is the same circuitry that responded to rustling in the grass in the Pleistocene. When a colleague's AI-augmented output threatens a developer's professional identity, the fear is calibrated by
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