Meditations on "non-public" AI
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Like many inadvisable writings, this one started with dinner and a few drinks with friends and took on a life of its own.
So with that, here’s a story.
Fire
Once upon a time, humans were but a weak creation, carved carefully and lovingly out of clay, but with little to hold them together.
In spite of the delicate existence, humans lived in harmony and there was no strife between them, even if this life was, at best, balancing on a pinhead—at the whims of the gods and what they deemed to be allowed. They did not die, but could not build; they did not age, but also could not create.
Prometheus (quite literally “the one with foresight”) who had so exquisitely carved his tiny peoples, understands that fire—a power held only by the gods and granted to these little clay people only under careful supervision—could allow them to cook and live. But unbridled use of fire could turn them into agents able to change the world they live in. Ants, yes, who would be buffeted by the whims and thoughts of the gods. But also ants able to build and think and work and lust and create and understand and live.
Prometheus of course, also understood that fire, like many bargains, was a Faustian one: his creatures would forever be cursed to toil and hate and deceive. They would be cursed to age and die. In a strict sense, the score is pretty obvious, by essentially any reasonable metric: the tiny, fragile humans must be protected from such a horrid existence at all costs.
For, after all, who would want a life of toil, unhappiness, and death? What would it be for, if just for the ability to be agents in a world governed by forces as strong as gods? What good could these fragile creatures do, when the risks are so high and the payoffs are so obviously low?
What is agency worth, if you have aging? If you have death?
And yet, as we know, the myth continues: Prometheus, with the foresight to understand the losses these feeble little creatures would endure and the torture he would have to bear as punishment, stole fire from the gods and gave it to his tiny creations.
And, in doing so, turned them into mortals, yes, but also gods of their own.