One “must” for this week: The end isn’t nigh
I often read some anxiety-inducing headlines stating that “artificial intelligence is about to destroy all jobs (or humanity altogether), or at bring us towards a completely unrecognisable future.
But the argument Oliver Burkeman makes here isn’t about AI or any other potential cause of disaster. It’s that it’s incredibly hard, and maybe impossible, to escape the distorted perspective that’s been labelled “temporal chauvinism”: the feeling that the time we’re living in now is the most significant or terrifying one ever, simply because it’s the one you happen to be around to experience
And by the way because as human we all have the same “negativity bias” and tend to overweight the negative stuff over goodf news.
It’s also true that present-day unknowns feel the scariest, because all previous unknowns eventually resolved themselves into knowns, and every previous prediction of the end of the world turned out to be wrong, and future ones are not yet here.
What’s the good news? If radical insecurity is just how life is, then by definition, you’re already coping with it, and we have what it takes to deal with the world.
Personal development
Innovation
Leadership and management
One book
“Antifragile: things that gain from disorder” by Nassim Taleb.