In his 2008 book, Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear, Canadian academic Dan Gardner sought to trace humanity’s various ills to one source—our inability to accurately evaluate risk. He posits that the 24-hour news cycle—and the havoc it has wreaked on our psyches—has created a dynamic which has increasingly skewed our judgement of what is or is not dangerous and risks proximate to our lives. As a result, according to Gardner, we are now a global village united by our anxieties as much as our shared experiences.
When geneticist and computational biologist Christopher Mason and I started writing The Age of Prediction, we wanted to consider how the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution could fundamentally transform even human activities—from the most fundamental to the most complex. At the same time, we wanted to explore how AI could reshape our perception and emotions, the kind of second-order impact analysis that Gardner so powerfully conducted.
Risk is another word for uncertainty. It is a foundational …