In this post I examine the actuarial structures of various groups—from Finnish 8-year-olds to Congress—and the implications. It includes an interactive tool I designed to let people play with risk models.
When consensus predictions don't pan out, it is always worth noting. That is why it is so striking how little attention it is getting that we had the future of technology dead wrong.
Technology often has unintended consequences that reduce the benefit of the technology itself. I wrote about a variant of this in my posts about Stanley Jevons, but in this note we abstract up a little and talk about revenge effects in more general terms.
What happens when people decide an occupation is toast? This is an important question given what we see happening in many occupations that once looked appealing, and now, post large language models (LLMs), look less so.
Some updates on AI, energy, Jevons paradox, and how we are not even running to stand still in some complex systems
Mimicry is a complex and important topic across biology, markets, social networks, and other domains. It can lead to unexpected outcomes, as well as new sources of fragility.
I recently drove across America and back again. And here is what I saw and thought it meant, from truckstops, to wind farms, to EVs, to, AI.
Many actions make things worse when attempting to make them better. A subset of these activities introduces entirely new forms of unexpected risk.