121 - Investments in Humanity

As a certain oddly globalized holiday approaches, take a moment to think of everyone you currently know who has #cancer or #trauma, who may be unemployed or underemployed, who fled a war-torn country, or who is still in one.

Each of these problems may be treated, and prevented, in far more effective and efficient ways than are available today. Each is complex, and neither humans nor conventional AI handles that complexity well. They handle complexity far worse when it comes to prevention, where the complexity skyrockets.

The son of my colleague was in a severe traffic accident in recent weeks, causing severe spinal cord damage and leaving him hospitalized, likely to not recover the ability to walk for at least a year, if at all. Had our funding and deployment not been delayed by the nonsensical hype of trashbot technology his treatment could have been handled by a proper #superintelligence, systems fundamentally unlike stochastic parrots.

Any given person walking around in the world more than likely knows someone with cancer, heart disease, neurological deterioration, severe physical or mental injuries, or any number of other problems that current treatment and prevention measures are largely inept to address. That means that every potential investor knows someone who is directly and massively impacted by their decision, to invest in the technology that can help and/or save them, or not. Everyone has a "Tiny Tim".

Cognitive #bias makes humans very bad at making certain types of decisions, but it also means that they're more likely to address a problem once they've identified a specific victim of that problem ("Identifiable Victim Effect"). This may "nudge" them to make a wiser choice.

In the case of the technology my team works with, every single investor knows multiple people, including their friends, family, and even themselves, who are directly and massively impacted in a negative way, every single time the funding and deployment of our technology is delayed. They harm each of those people directly, every time they make the unwise choice.

While the choice to harm 8 billion people by delaying the necessary technology may exceed human comprehension, the faces of those they know who they actively choose to harm are perfectly comprehensible.

This can be my "Christmas Carol" for all of the #investors of the world. What ghosts of your decisions today will haunt you in the coming years? Like Scrooge, your window of opportunity will close, so choose now, and choose wisely.