The Next Renaissance

CHAPTER 3Costs of the RenAIssance

All progress comes with costs, and major technological leaps often come with particularly great ones. The rise of the written word preserved knowledge but weakened the arts of memorization and the oral storytelling that once defined cultures. Movable type spread literacy but also accelerated propaganda and deepened social divisions. Nuclear energy also gave us nuclear weapons. The internet connected billions but brought rising anxiety, shrinking attention spans, and diminished face‐to‐face community. Even the first Renaissance, for all its brilliance, fractured the religious and political order of Europe, unleashing centuries of conflict alongside centuries of progress.

The RenAIssance will be no different. Some costs are inevitable, the non‐negotiable price of progress. Others, avoidable, if we have the foresight and discipline to act before they take root. A few are intolerable, trade‐offs so corrosive to our values or survival that they must be rejected outright, whatever they promise to return. The task ahead is to tell one from the other, to manage what must be paid, to prevent what need not be paid, and to refuse what should never be paid.

In the coming pages, we'll examine five such costs, including shifts in how we think, how we connect, how we define ourselves, and the risks of malicious use and existential failure.

Misaligned Superintelligence

Whenever AI comes up at a dinner party, which is often, it usually takes less than 20 minutes ...