Shownotes Transcript
Prologue
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Prologue
A man in a tribe in 8,000 BC is delighted to have killed a gazelle. However, this happiness is short lived, as the food is barely enough for a family of five. Will he be able to find food the next day? A high school graduate just received a letter from Princeton. She holds up the letter with a mixed sense of anxiety and thrill and gets ready to open it. A whole nation is mesmerized by watching the returns. Which party is going to rule the country for the next four years? A couple is on their way to the airport to go on their scheduled holiday when they learn that all flights have been canceled due to a pandemic.
Experts debate whether humanity is facing environmental catastrophe in the 21st century. As the debate rages on, different opinions arise about the impact and the possible solutions to follow, but no one is sure what will happen.
What do all these, seemingly unrelated, anecdotes have in common?
Uncertainty is a common thread of existence. Recent advances in technology are simply the materialization of efforts to fight this enemy that humanity has faced since its beginnings. Philosophers dealt with questions around the nature of true knowledge and the state of the world. Mathematicians came up with ways to measure uncertainty and its opposite—information. Uncertainty is a part of life, one many of us would rather not live with, but one that we can’t avoid.
The world is changing, and one of the major changes we’re seeing is the increase of information, interconnectedness, measurement, control, and prediction. In our 24/7 connected world, there are few secrets left. We do not believe that dragons live at the edge of the world, or that monsters exist in forests outside our cities. Rather, those dragons and monsters now live in the future: in the unpredictable financial crisis, the unexpected illness, the unanticipated traffic jam that might cost us our job, or the unforeseen consequences of our choices, be they political or personal. We are gradually conquering the frontier of uncertainty, but some walls still seem impenetrable.