What
do you lay awake at night worrying about? Are your worries different than
those far smarter than you? Perhaps.
John Brockman of Edge magazine asked what the world’s most intelligent
brainiacs – including Physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, technologist
Tim O’Reilly, musician Brian Eno, The Black Swan author Nassim
Nicholas Taleb – about their professional worries and got a lot of responses.
One hundred and fifty distinct worries, in fact. Thankfully, VICE’s Motherboard
blog has summarized
it for us:
1. The proliferation of Chinese eugenics. – Geoffrey Miller,
evolutionary psychologist.2. Black swan events, and the fact that we continue to rely on models
that have been proven fraudulent. – Nassem Nicholas Taleb3. That we will be unable to defeat viruses by learning to push them
beyond the error catastrophe threshold. – William McEwan, molecular
biology researcher4. That pseudoscience will gain ground. – Helena Cronin, author,
philospher5. That the age of accelerating technology will overwhelm us with opportunities
to be worried. – Dan Sperber, social and cognitive scientist6. Genuine apocalyptic events. The growing number of low-probability
events that could lead to the total devastation of human society. –
Martin Rees, former president of the Royal Society7. The decline in science coverage in newspapers. – Barbara Strauch,
New York Times science editor8. Exploding stars, the eventual collapse of the Sun, and the problems
with the human id that prevent us from dealing with them. — John Tooby,
founder of the field of evolutionary psychology9. That the internet is ruining writing. – David Gelernter, Yale
computer scientist10. That smart people–like those who contribute to Edge–won’t
do politics. –Brian Eno, musician11. That there will be another supernova-like financial disaster. –Seth
Lloyd, professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering at MIT12. That search engines will become arbiters of truth. –W. Daniel
Hillis, physicist13. The dearth of desirable mates is something we should worry about,
for “it lies behind much human treachery and brutality.â€
–David M. Buss, professor of psychology at U of T14. “I’m worried that our technology is helping to bring
the long, postwar consensus against fascism to an end.†–David
Bodanis, writer, futurist15. That we will continue to uphold taboos on bad words. –Benhamin
Bergen, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, UCS
Humanity, start worrying! Or, you can just accept it all, like Terry
Gilliam of Monty Python, who said:
I’ve given up asking questions. l merely float on a tsunami of acceptance
of anything life throws at me… and marvel stupidly.
Read the original post over at Edge: Link
| Summary at Motherboard
blog