On to the next, but you haven't finished the last one yet.

An incessant rush, feckless & headlong.

Yes you "looked" before you leapt, but what you looked at was the promise of what's next, not the gap right in front of you. Now the fall has started and we wonder, is it too late to catch ourselves...

I want to be clear this isnt anti AI, or anti tech, its just that you have to admit you can't really trust us can you? Before we fully understood uranium we'd already packaged and sold it as everything from children's novelty to virility aids. We recommended coke for therapy, used lead as makeup, added asbestos to cigarettes for a "healthier" smoke, and prescribed thalidomide to pregnant women. Routinely we find metaphorical guns and start shooting them off because we like the sound of the bang, without knowing what bullets are or their affects.

"But now its different C.B, now we've learnt from all those past mistakes".

Look, I am no professional scholar, but I have spent hundreds of hours reading about and researching some of the worst events in our history, both recent and far flung, by individuals and industry. People ALWAYS think they know better than the past, and people will refuse to accept, and actively supress new information if it goes against their personal gain. We will happily and hypocritically claim to be better, to have learnt from the past, whilst refusing to accept that our past mistakes weren't born out of some collective lack of IQ that we have now "evolved" away from, but rather a combination of innovations necessary ignorance, a startling impatience, and an unceasing avarice. All of those qualities are just as present in us now as they were then.

So i urge caution, not avoidance or ignorance, but caution, take the necessary time to understand what it is these tools may do, what impact they may have on your thoughts, how they may be worst used by the worst of us. Understand that just because we shaped it does not mean we control it, this is a lesson even the Gods on Olympus had to learn (repeatedly, and painfully) and as is hinted at by those myths we shaped, it should be a lesson we make intrinsic to our society. For as long as we have had fire we should have been learning this lesson. To be cautious when using something that can spread damage so quickly.

Yet somehow despite a millennia of lessons, despite Bhopal, Hawks nest, Chernobyl, Ycuá Bolaño, lead makeup, fast food, cigarettes and asbestos, despite the deadly dietary and fashion choices of the courts, the sale of OxyContin, the use of lobotomies as therapy, the consumption of fossil fuels and propagation of plastic in our environment, we do not learn.

We use the faux mask of progress to hide thalidomide deformities. Convince ourselves that now we know of cancer we'll stop causing it. We say all regulations are written in blood, yet dip our pens in that self-same ink time and time again.

And then a group of tech bros have the audacity, the sheer level of arrogant ignorance, to say we should "move fast and break things" As though breaking things has no consequence, as though all of human history is not littered with a thousand lessons on the cost of moving too fast and breaking too much. They say this as though the maxim machine gun didn't cut down an entire generation in their millions in a matter of years because we failed to think of the impact tech had on tactics. They say this as though the world didn't nearly end ten times over as the minutemen moved the doomsday clock ever closer to midnight, because those in charge were so blinded by the power they now held they refused to look beyond their own lives, preferring to burn us all in hellfire than let those damn commies win.

They say this as though the things they are breaking arent people. As if when they moved fast and broke things it was just code and terminals, not communities and culture they shattered. They say it despite the originator of the quote heading up a company that moved fast and broke so many people. Zuckerberg did just that, by setting up in countries without moderators who spoke the language, they allowed (and through the way they honed their algorithm , encouraged) the spread of genocidal rhetoric and organised physical persecution of people in Myanmar.

Perhaps the idiocy, the arrogance and avarice of this attitude is best surmised from the lawsuit bought against Facebook in that case; “In the end, there was so little for Facebook to gain from its continued presence in Burma, and the consequences for the Rohingya people could not have been more dire. Yet, in the face of this knowledge, and possessing the tools to stop it, it simply kept marching forward.”

Now i'll reiterate, I am not opposed to tools, to AI and Brain input devices, to physical augments or self driving cars. But I am also keenly aware of just how hasty and selfish we can be, how willing the minority is to get the majority hooked on x or y to drive up profit, How in service of that same profit their are plenty who would burn next month just for a little more today. So i urge caution, before we're all caught up in a current event so strong we cant swim against it.

Move slow and make stuff.