I've been struck recently by the power and surprise of unintended consequences. For example, a recent Slate article digs into flip side of the life-saving potential of automated vehicles: our reliance on car crash deaths for organ donors:

"An estimated 94 percent of motor-vehicle accidents involve some kind of a driver error. As the number of vehicles with human operators falls, so too will the preventable fatalities. In June, Christopher A. Hart, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said, “Driverless cars could save many if not most of the 32,000 lives that are lost every year on our streets and highways.” Even if self-driving cars only realize a fraction of their projected safety benefits, a decline in the number of available organs could begin as soon as the first wave of autonomous and semiautonomous vehicles hits the road—threatening to compound our nation’s already serious shortages." [#]

Or, with gene editing, what if we are successful at eradicating illness and preserving life forever?  What new challenges will that present?  How will we eat?  How will we not consume all of earth's natural resources?  Or perhaps the life-saving potential will ultimately be canceled out by the life-harming potential -- it's clearly just as possible to use gene editing to weaponize mosquitos as it is to sterilize them. Or, with the democratization of media -- on the one hand radically increasing freedom of expression, but also laying the foundation for the "fake news" problem.  I don't think anyone who believed in the power of social networks to enable free speech and political organizing online really saw that coming, and it's a real, hard problem. Or, with artificial intelligence -- how do we avoid being blinded by the shiny newness of helpful automation while ignoring potential existential threats? Bill Gates on that subject:

"I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence," Gates wrote. "First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned." [#]

All of these consequences are made more serious by the fact that in a connected world, change can take place very very quickly, and it can be hard, or impossible to manage or roll back. A single person in a single place now has more power to impact the world (the whole world!) than ever before.  As Kevin Esvelt, the geneticist who is the subject of the New Yorker article linked above said: "as a single scientist, I can alter an organism in a laboratory that will have more of an effect on all your lives than anything the legislature across the river can do." [#] So what to do?  These kinds of changes are coming (seemingly) faster than ever.  I like Esvelt's suggestion that, in the case of gene editing, we should be building "undo" functionality into anything we deploy:

"With CRISPR and gene-drive technology, it might be possible for just one engineered mosquito, or fly, or any other animal or seed, to eventually change the fundamental genetics of an entire species. As Esvelt puts it, “A release anywhere could be a release everywhere.” Recognizing the possibility of an irreversible error, however, he and Church, in their earliest experiments, began to build drives capable of restoring any DNA that had been removed. Both say that if an edit cannot be corrected it should not be attempted. They also suggest retaining, in its original form, some part of any population that has been edited—a kind of molecular Noah’s Ark." [#]

That's one approach that seems reasonably and will hopefully be effective, at least in some cases.  But for most of what we're doing there is no natural "undo" function, so we must think about other ways to manage, or at the very least, quantify and understand, the consequences of what we're making.

I'm in SF this week with the USV team - once a year we all come out here together, do a bunch of meetings and social events w our portfolio. Yesterday struck me -- and it's amazing how much of a surprise this is to me, after doing this nearly 5 years -- with just how exciting it is to be around people who are executing hard against a big vision.  Four meetings yesterday, with four companies at different stages of development, but the common theme: founders who are going after it. Big problem, big opportunity, big fix.  Man, it's exciting.

The week before last, my in-laws were hit by a truck while crossing the street after dinner. The time since has been a disorienting whirlwind of sadness, fear, hope and thankfulness.  My mother-in-law suffered a very serious brain injury, and while she has cleared the first hurdle of basic survival, the outlook won't be clear for quite some time.  It's been enormously trying on the whole family, and will continue to be for a long time; maybe forever. The issue I want to reflect on here is how, in the face of previously unimaginable circumstances, we seem to have the ability to quickly reset to the new normal.  Two weeks ago it was unthinkable that this would have happened and she'd be in this condition, and now, that's just how things are -- that's where we're starting from and it's what we have to work with. I find that encouraging, and also a little bit scary.  On the one hand, it shows how adaptable humans are, how we can handle more than we might think.  On the other hand, it shows how fragile any current environment or situation can be.  I'm inspired by our ability to take things in stride, and also a little bit terrified by the reality of how quickly things can change. For instance, lots of the talk this election cycle has been drawing parallels between now and the WWII era, in particular looking at what people did or didn't do to stop the rise of Hitler.  As with Trump today, Germans of the 1930s didn't take Hitler seriously, and I'm sure couldn't believe that such a radical change in national character could happen so quickly.  Whether or not you find that comparison fair, the point is that things can change quickly (or seemingly quickly). Given that, I'm thinking about two things: First, man you gotta appreciate what you have when you have it.  Looking back at photos from two weeks ago, or thinking about the last time we saw each other a day before the accident -- that's a lifetime ago now. And it's cliche, but realizing how quickly things can change really helps you motivate to appreciate what you have.  Whether that's family, friends, democracy, or the environment (however imperfect each may be).  For the past week, every time I've been snuggled up with my kids & my wife, or enjoying a moment with a friend, or tackling an interesting work-related issue, I've been hyper aware of how awesome is to be alive and doing that. Second, maybe change isn't so scary after all.  Someone once explained this to me as pain x resistance = suffering.  We burn a lot of effort and energy worrying about what might happen and what it might mean, resisting any exposure to pain.  But this is ineffective and counterproductive, and in fact only increases our suffering.  When bad things actually do happen, we face the pain and move through it, and only then are then able to build up.  This is hard to internalize, especially with smaller things on a day-to-day basis, but I think there's something there to grab onto. To sum up, I just want to say thank you to everyone that has been supporting us through this time, and also thank you to everyone out there putting one foot in front of the other to get through every day, no matter what issues are dogging you.