You are pregnant. So am I

Original Medium Post HERE

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We all are. Are we taking the steps to prepare?

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I’m not “handy.” I’ve undertaken two major assembly projects in my adult life. I’m proud to say I succeeded in both. It only took twice as long as the instructions said it would take.

The second of the two was constructing my future son’s Norwegian-made, supposedly easy-to-assemble, white wooden convertible bassinet-crib-first bed.

It only took me an hour . . . to build it the wrong way and need to unscrew some screws and start over. Finally, after about 5 hours on that winter Saturday, I had constructed the whole thing — complete with fluffy pillow cloud-moon-star mobile above.

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That construction project was one tiny part of our preparation before our son arrived. We began preparing before pregnancy: talking about when to have a child and whether to try by adoption or by birth. My wife needed new doctors and prenatal vitamins.

While she was pregnant, we took birthing classes, went on a babymoon, prepared for parental leave, got a new car and a new carseat. We went to OB/Gyn, and so many other, appointments.

Our families and friends prepared: throwing us baby showers, giving advice. We planned for my parents to help with child care and to share a babysitter with friends on other days.

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The preparation was essential, but we weren’t prepared. We couldn’t really know what our parenting for our child would require until we were parenting our child.

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You are very pregnant.

We all are.

It’s triplets (at least). They arrive any day.

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We are pregnant with the next technological revolution. This one is happening much more quickly and globally than past revolutions did. The agricultural revolution took millennia to reach much of the world; the industrial revolution: more than a century; the knowledge revolution: perhaps decades. This AI revolution might transform our lives and societies in just years.

Many people wanted this baby eventually, but we weren’t exactly planning this pregnancy to happen now. We’re extra unready.

We might be eagerly anticipating this AI revolution baby for many reasons: reducing grunt work, expediting important drug research, providing new opportunities for creative expression.

We might already be experiencing some restless, sleepless nights too, worrying about AI taking jobs, people losing human friends and lovers to an addictive internet void, democracies crumbling amidst increasingly realistic fake news, and bad actors using AI-amplified instruments of destruction.

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How do we prepare for this birth?

How do we who are collectively parenting prepare to strengthen our collective relationship: our societal bond, rather than letting new challenges tear us apart?

This work is particularly tricky because we are all becoming a collective first parent to this new technology. No one has come from the future to give us advice.

In our analogy, it’s like no one has been a parent before, and the best advice available is from someone who adopted a pet.

We can look to social media, which was a whole new pet. It has been linked to major increases in depression, anxiety and isolation.

One lesson: this time, we need to identify unintended consequences earlier — and respond more quickly.

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How are we doing?

Perhaps, like me, you receive several invitations to webinars about AI every week.

There has been massive investment in the technological development and focus on integrating this technology into our work and lives. In 2023, one-third of all venture capital investment was in AI startups.

It’s like we are paying attention to, and spending on, health care for the pregnancy and delivery. But metaphorically speaking, we don’t even have the carseat to bring this baby home (although there definitely have been podcasts and articles talking about the need for a carseat).

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What we need to do

Preparation and infrastructure

Philanthropy, government, think tanks, and higher education must invest in multidisciplinary research and experimentation to understand: the human, biological, social, environmental, political, geopolitical, psychological and economic risks; the changes for workers; and the ripple effects of these changes.

Armed with this research, we have to move into action at an unprecedented scale and pace.

· We need new governance and institutions that can rapidly adapt to new information.

· AI companies could become the wealthiest companies producing the wealthiest people in history. We need new approaches to ensure their money and influence don’t trample the public good.

· International cooperation will be essential to prevent a race to the bottom — where companies move to the place of least regulation to make the most profit.

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Specific changes

We will need to reinvent education for a future with very different jobs and a different civil society.

We need to understand who we as humans are and how we flourish. That will help us stay focused on having technology work for us — rather having us work for the technology. To do this, we need to re-emphasize history, literature, philosophy, political science, civics, psychology, sociology, anthropology. We need to renew civil society and develop new cultural norms to hold together under the coming stress of change.

A community joy[1] approach will help us strengthen civil society — and strengthen human resilience, preparing us to thrive through change and disruption.

Just as we invest hundreds of billions of dollars in health care research each year, so we need to significantly increase investment in social R&D to develop programs and social infrastructures (like the community joy approach) that people need to thrive in this new future (those programs and social infrastructures can be really important for health too).

We’ll need new economic and workforce approaches to ensure we use new AI-generated wealth to improve human and civic wellbeing and sustainability; to reverse recent trends and strengthen people’s sense of connection to purpose.

We’ll need increased political will and focus to collectively take this on — and somehow we need to generate that political will before we’re actually seeing the negative impacts. We need people to work together, across political differences, to take on these big challenges.

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That could sound scary. That could sound undoable. But people have stepped up to big challenges before and have collectively excelled. Maybe somewhere in all this, there is just the call to purpose we all need.

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