We ask one question about every new technology: what could go wrong? This episode is about the question we almost never ask — what goes wrong because we didn’t — and why one of those two ledgers is always full of names while the other stays empty. It starts in a machinery space on the Baltic, and it ends at your electricity meter. Runtime about 43 minutes.
In my early twenties I was a sub-lieutenant and second engineer on HMS Ystad, a Swedish missile boat built in the seventies, on watch in a machinery space where the word operator still meant what it says. One diesel on line. Then the gun’s hydraulics spin up, a fire pump kicks in, the frequency starts to sag, and you have a decision and a clock. Start the second generator — which on that boat you did by hand, matching voltage, frequency and phase, closing the breaker at the one instant the machines are in step. Or shed load, and everyone on the bridge knows exactly who did it. Or do nothing, and let the physics decide. On a warship. At night.
The navy’s lesson, and the episode’s: doing nothing is not the safe option. It is just the option where you do not have to move your hands. I have blacked out a ship — more than once. In drills. That is what the drills were for. You practice the blackout so the real night never gets one.
Ashore, only half of that lesson survived. In public argument, one question gets asked with great seriousness: what could go wrong if we build this? The other question — what goes wrong if we don’t — almost never gets asked at all. The episode is about why, and about what that asymmetry costs.
The column with no names in it
The mechanism is old and it is not a conspiracy. Bastiat wrote it down in 1850: the bad economist counts the visible effect; the good one also counts what the decision prevents from ever existing. The economist Alex Tabarrok gave the modern version its name — the invisible graveyard. Approve a bad drug and the victims have names, families, hearings. Delay a good one and people die too, but no death certificate anywhere says regulatory delay. The incentive follows the visibility, not the arithmetic.
And it is not just institutions. In 1990, Ritov and Baron showed that people refuse to vaccinate a hypothetical child until the disease is roughly ten times deadlier than the vaccine — with the numbers printed on the page in front of them. A harm we cause feels worse than a larger harm we allow. The bias survives the arithmetic. All of us carry it. That is exactly what makes it dangerous: a society can take a decision whose cost is real, large and paid by identifiable people, and nobody ever gets sent the bill.
The one time somebody added it up
After Fukushima, Germany shut roughly half its nuclear fleet. The decision was made by frightened people, and the fear was not ridiculous. But years later, three economists (Jarvis, Deschenes and Jha) did the arithmetic, hour by hour, plant by plant. The missing nuclear power was replaced mostly by coal. Cost: about twelve billion dollars a year — and more than seventy percent of that is mortality. More than 1,100 additional deaths per year, from particulates and sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. Nobody in that number died in a reactor accident. Nobody in that number was on television.
Widen the lens and the pattern is brutal. Per terawatt-hour of electricity, counting accidents and air pollution, coal kills around 25 people. Nuclear — counting Chernobyl, counting Fukushima — kills 0.07. Air pollution killed an estimated 8.1 million people in 2021. One technology has three named events in half a century. The other has no events at all. It just has diagnoses.
To be precise: this is not a nuclear episode, and I am not telling Europe to build reactors. If you ask me where acceleration comes from in the 2020s, I point at solar and batteries — faster to deploy, still getting cheaper, and by the same grim table even safer. My argument is about the counting. We ranked the safest technologies we have ever built by fear instead of by arithmetic.
The deaths we have already agreed to
Two exhibits, running live, in the most comfortable corner of the planet.
The summer: researchers counted 61,672 heat-related deaths in Europe in the summer of 2022. Nearly 48,000 the year after. Around 62,700 in 2024. Meanwhile 90 percent of American households have air conditioning, and 19 percent of European ones — and in large parts of Europe, air conditioning is discussed as a vice rather than a safety technology. Not one of those deaths is recorded as a casualty of the air conditioner that was never installed. The graveyard is not just invisible. It is seasonal.
The road: about 19,400 people died on European roads last year, and nobody calls it a crisis. Waymo has published peer-reviewed data across more than 220 million driverless miles: 94 percent fewer crashes causing serious injury or worse. The insurance industry’s own institute independently found 81 percent fewer injury crashes per mile. Caveats apply and I say them out loud in the episode. And this one is personal: I bought Full Self-Driving for my own Tesla in 2020. Six years later the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium and the Baltics have approved it — and Sweden is still among the countries asking what could go wrong. The capability sits in my driveway, switched off by decree. I am not a commentator on this queue. I am standing in it.
When caution was right
If the episode only told stories where the careful people were wrong, it would be a sales pitch with a body count. So it gives the strongest counter-case its full ninety seconds: thalidomide, and Frances Kelsey, the FDA reviewer who refused to approve it against a year of company pressure because the evidence was thin — and was completely right. Note what made her different. She was not refusing to count the second column. She weighed both, and objected to the evidence, not the newness. The failure mode this episode is about is counting one column, diligently, in exhaustive detail — and calling the result prudence.
The same discipline cuts my own side. Copper is real. Protection systems are real. Keeping a grid at fifty hertz is not a metaphor. Acceleration that ignores the physical bill is the identical mistake wearing a different jersey.
The argument we are in the middle of
All of this is happening again right now, at maximum volume, about intelligence itself. The 2023 open letter calling for a pause on large AI training asked what could go wrong — a legitimate question, seriously meant. But the other column was never itemized. Nobody attached a body count to waiting. Nobody ever does.
So the episode itemizes a little. A Nobel Prize went, in large part, to a piece of software that predicted the structure of essentially every protein science has catalogued — over 200 million of them, free, used by more than two million researchers — where one structure used to consume a doctoral career. The first drug candidates found this way are in human trials. Every year a treatment arrives earlier is a year of people who do not die waiting for it, and not one of them will ever know which timeline they were spared from.
And then the twist that ties my two worlds together: the constraint on intelligence has become electrical. The AI buildout — the richest industry in the history of money — is learning that it cannot buy its way past a substation. In Virginia, a hundred-megawatt connection has been quoted at up to seven years. In Sweden, the queue to consume power (32,450 MW) is now bigger than the queue to produce it. Ireland has €5.8 billion of fully permitted data centres that cannot operate because the connection does not exist. Permits granted. Capital committed. Copper missing.
That is what the second column looks like up close. Not a catastrophe. An absence. You cannot lay flowers at a factory that went to Texas.
Choose the other column
Decline is a choice, which means the opposite is a choice too. I just finished Ben Rich’s Skunk Works, and it is full of the opposite: a small team that built America’s first jet fighter in 143 days, the U-2 in eight months, and the Blackbird — with slide rules, out of titanium bought through front companies from the Soviet Union itself. Every one of those machines was impossible, according to people whose job it was to know. And the team was not reckless. Kelly Johnson ran the strictest engineering discipline in the industry. They counted both columns, fast, and then they built.
Abundance is not something that happens to us. It is something we choose to build. Energy nobody has to ration; intelligence nobody has to queue for. What stands between us and them is not physics. It is bookkeeping.
We are very good at asking what could go wrong. The question we owe our children is: what went wrong because we didn’t?
Reality always has a location, a clock, and a meter.
Listen above. Runtime about 43 minutes.
Production note: this episode is narrated by the cloned version of my own voice, and the script was written with AI assistance under my direction and review. Key sources: Jarvis, Deschenes & Jha (JEEA 2022) on the German phase-out; Ballester et al. (Nature Medicine) on European heat mortality; Our World in Data on deaths per terawatt-hour; Svenska kraftnät on the Swedish connection queue; Duke University’s “Rethinking Load Growth”; Ben Rich’s “Skunk Works”.
