By all accounts, I should be a neofeudalist. I should love what’s happening. The AI I dreamed of my whole life is being built, engineer-type strongmen are sort of in charge, and people are saying out loud the things I have just thought. You might argue that I like it and I’m just not happy with my seat at the table. I ask myself a lot if this is true, like what if I was Elon. Would I be enjoying it then from that position?
Of course it’s impossible to know for sure, but I think I really wouldn’t. Even the ideal version, industrial megaprojects at hyperhuman scale while constantly being out over your skis with leverage sounds hellish. It’s not a society I want to live in, regardless of my seat. I would much prefer someone like this design society, with careful nuanced takes about technology.
When I see the lawsuit between Elon and Sam Altman, I’m probably rooting for Sam. Not because he is great, I mean, he did steal a charity. But what were Elon’s plans for it? At least Sam fundamentally is a product guy who I believe actually does delight in building products people love. Elon on the other hand? None of his stuff is seriously open source, and it’s not that he lacks opportunity to do it. He just doesn’t value it. I can hear the rabid Elon fan defending him about Tesla patents or the Twitter algorithm or something, but those are not serious open source projects. They are not institutions, even compared to Kubernetes and React, never mind compared to Linux and ffmpeg.
He isn’t Dario EA levels of evil, like the EA people have a plan for you and it’s never good when someone has a plan for you. You know, the Mythos fear based marketing campaign is not the first time the Anthropic people have done this. They did the exact same thing in 2019 for GPT-2 XL. As soon as they get any attention it’s like they can’t help themselves. And you might say, oh, that was OpenAI, but that was 2019 and Anthropic spun out of OpenAI in 2021. IT’S LITERALLY THE EXACT SAME PEOPLE DOING THE SAME EXACT SHIT. I just can’t believe anyone is falling for it. Hopefully we get to a day when we just laugh at people like this and tell them to go save some shrimp or something. I feel bad for the shrimp that the EAs have a plan for them.
But back outside the land of cartoonish villians, I don’t understand Elon’s worldview when it comes to AI. How does a normal person fit into Elon’s world? What institutions will Elon leave behind? Is there any value in that society to art and culture? Or will we all just spend our days receiving universal high income and gooning to Ani? Like that isn’t a vision of a society I want to be a part of.
It works for Mars. I think there’s so much value in colonizing Mars, and it’s sad to me to see SpaceX diluting the mission buying up random AI bubble crap. Mars takes hard people in a hard society. Earth doesn’t. If AI doesn’t work for normal people, I don’t want it and you shouldn’t either.
It is coming, and the anti AI people would do poorly to bury their heads in the sand. Doing that won’t stop AI from being built. The good world is where everyone has AI, and not as a revokable privilege through an API, but through hard possession. Pay attention to who is releasing AI to the world and who has released nothing, then think about who the good guys are.
As an American, is this an investment into helping you and improving your life, or figuring out how to take your job and further extract from you? I think most Americans have been watching tech companies for the last 10 years and understand which one it is. They aren’t going to get better with more power, they are going to get worse.