There are three ways you can think of an innovation. Some see it as a silver bullet, some will tell you that it’s the work of Satan. And then you have the sensible thinker telling you that, just like most advancement we’ve ever known, there’s a little bit of both, but probably more one than the other, and that’s how we ought to make prudent, ethically sound choices.

But having some black and some white doesn’t always mean you get gray. The good and the bad don’t always merge. Sometimes you have a zebra, A white canvas with black stripes, or a black canvas with white stripes (which is the right answer).

So the question of making decisions on zebra topics is not only about figuring out how much black vs how much grey there is. It’s about figuring out who gets which color.

I call a zebra a situation in which the positives and the negatives aren’t evenly dispersed. The internet was not a Zebra. Yes, if you have opportunities, the internet multiplies them. But it also creates opportunities from nothing for the have-nots. So it lifts everyone and its known shortcomings disadvantage everyone. It’s a very light grey.

Climate change on the other hand is a Zebra. Some places are becoming nicer while some burn or drown. The changes might or might not cancel out in the aggregate, but even if the net is positive, you can’t think of it like that. When your house is on fire and the well runs dry, you never say: “But I bet the sun is lovely in Edinburgh”

Catching a zebra, meaning solving a zebra problem requires us to not only think in aggregates but go into the details and see who’s getting the short end of the stick. This requires us to drop our juvenile idea that people are the same.

The poor, the sick, the silly, the oppressed, and the otherwise unlucky don’t think they are the same as everyone. They’re right. Only the rich, the healthy, the pretty, and those with abundant luck, like yours truly, think that people are the same. In our attempt to humble ourselves, we become more selfish and fail to discriminate where discrimination is called for.

This is not a call for some affirmative action nonsense. It’s a call for a safari expedition, where we watch the wilderness up close and call out Zebras. “look, Timmy, you see that white athletic donkey-looking thing with the black straps, that’s a Zebra”. “Ah, you mean the fat black horse with the white stripes. Cool”

Technology is not always a Zebra. The wheel helps everyone equally, and so do electricity and automation. They have their pros and cons but they are clearly very light grays. My concern these days is about this level of AI. I think it’s a big fat Zebra and we have the time to catch it.

Actual zebras, unlike donkeys, horses, and camels, don’t do well in captivity. Likewise, It’s not clear that AI can be tamed. But we still have the opportunity to make a decision on it. The decision can be to keep it as a tourist attraction. We can decide that it’s a good topic for a National Geographic documentary, but it doesn’t have a place on our farm.

There’s no rule that says that we have to allow capital to displace unrecoverable jobs just because it can. It’s ok to say no at some point. If the dark stripe is on the wrong end, we can say no thank you. We are perfectly within reason to domesticate the donkey, the camel, and the horse, and then draw the line at zebras. It’s an arbitrary line, but there’s nothing inherently wrong about those.