Everything Old Is New Again: Using What We Already Know for a Safer Future

Our world is filled with complexities and unknowns, and when these collide with emerging technologies, the resulting risk seems insurmountable. We accept this increased risk as a cost of using the new technology, assuming that previous lessons learned don’t apply and that a blank slate is required to gain the most benefit. However, this never turns out to be true. Time and time again, we realize that much of what we already know is still relevant to these emerging technologies, regardless of how advanced or paradigm-shifting they are. This is good news for reducing the risk in innovation because it means that we never really start from scratch. We begin our journey by examining how technological ghosts haunted previous technologies, showing the relevancy of already-known lessons. The journey continues to the current age of generative AI, examining the risks and challenges and how employing what we already know can lead to safer, more reliable systems and applications. In the end, we’ll see that by applying hard-won lessons to new technologies, we can ensure a safer, more reliable future.