Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Of course, people’s emotions are irrelevant if the risks are real. But risk assessments fall apart when they deal with highly improbable events in complex systems. Since we cannot replay history thousands of times and count the outcomes, a statement that some event will occur with a probability of .01 or .001 or .0001 or .00001 is essentially a readout of the assessor’s subjective confidence. This includes mathematical analyses in which scientists plot the distribution of events in the past (like wars or cyberattacks) and show they fall into a power-law distribution, one with “fat” or “thick” tails, in which extreme events are highly improbable but not astronomically improbable.⁷ The math is of little help in calibrating the risk, because the scattershot data along the tail of the distribution generally misbehave, deviating from a smooth curve and making estimation impossible. All we know is that very bad things can happen.

That takes us back to subjective readouts, which tend to be inflated by the Availability and Negativity biases and by the gravitas market (chapter 4).⁸ Those who sow fear about a dreadful prophecy may be seen as serious and responsible, while those who are measured are seen as complacent and naïve. Despair springs eternal. At least since the Hebrew prophets and the Book of Revelation, seers have warned their contemporaries about an imminent doomsday. Forecasts of End Times are a staple of psychics, mystics, televangelists, nut cults, founders of religions, and men pacing the sidewalk with sandwich boards saying “Repent!”⁹ The storyline that climaxes in harsh payback for technological hubris is an archetype of Western fiction, including Promethean fire, Pandora’s box, Icarus’s flight, Faust’s bargain, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Frankenstein’s monster, and, from Hollywood, more than 250 end-of-the-world flicks.¹⁰ As the engineer Eric Zencey has observed, “There is seduction in apocalyptic thinking. If one lives in the Last Days, one’s actions, one’s very life, take on historical meaning and no small measure of poignance.”¹¹

Scientists and technologists are by no means immune. Remember the Y2K bug?¹² In the 1990s, as the turn of the millennium drew near, computer scientists began to warn the world of an impending catastrophe. In the early decades of computing, when information was expensive, programmers often saved a couple of bytes by representing a year by its last two digits. They figured that by the time the year 2000 came around and the implicit “19” was no longer valid, the programs would be long obsolete. But complicated software is replaced slowly, and many old programs were still running on institutional mainframes and embedded in chips. When 12:00 A.M. on January 1, 2000, arrived and the digits rolled over, a program would think it was 1900 and would crash or go haywire (presumably because it would divide some number by the difference between what it thought was the current year and the year 1900, namely zero, though why a program would do this was never made clear). At that moment, bank balances would be wiped out, elevators would stop between floors, incubators in maternity wards would shut off, water pumps would freeze, planes would fall from the sky, nuclear power plants would melt down, and ICBMs would be launched from their silos.

And these were the hardheaded predictions from tech-savvy authorities (such as President Bill Clinton, who warned the nation, “I want to stress the urgency of the challenge. This is not one of the summer movies where you can close your eyes during the scary part”). Cultural pessimists saw the Y2K bug as comeuppance for enthralling our civilization to technology. Among religious thinkers, the numerological link to Christian millennialism was irresistible. The Reverend Jerry Falwell declared, “I believe that Y2K may be God’s instrument to shake this nation, humble this nation, awaken this nation and from this nation start revival that spreads the face of the earth before the Rapture of the Church.” A hundred billion dollars was spent worldwide on reprogramming software for Y2K Readiness, a challenge that was likened to replacing every bolt in every bridge in the world.