A little over a week ago, tech billionaire and teen eating disorder enthusiast Mark Zuckerberg published what many are calling his "AI manifesto," The Future is For Everyone. The piece is long, frankly too long, but it boils down to the same libertarian "power to the people at all costs" bullshit that Zuck's writing usually does. The crux of the piece is that in Mark's view, the world would be better off if "superintelligence" (his word for 'artificial general intelligence' or what most people call AGI) not only existed, but was readily available to everyone on earth.
As the good book once said, "this had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move." I heard about this on a long car ride last Friday in a few of my favorite podcasts.
The Vergecast
Nilay, in the way that only he can, immediately made the legal case against Zuck's argument that everyone on earth having what Zuck calls a "superintelligent lawyer" would not, as Mark claims, make justice more efficient or fair because the law does not work that way. No matter how badly these freaks want it to work like code or spreadsheets, the US legal system was not built to produce the same outcomes to the same questions every time. Its outputs are shaped by human biases and incentives, which means they are sometimes just fucking stupid. Everyone having an AI lawyer would not make the legal system more efficient because as Zuck damn well knows, a well-trained lawyer is often paid to drag things out.
David rightly made the comparison to guns, or even the mutually assured destruction of nuclear weapons. As the old saying goes, only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. Unless he's scared. He made the point in jest because the data makes it pretty clear that the "good guy with a gun" is a myth, at best. If you're waiting for someone to pull out a gun and save you, your time would be better spent wishing they wouldn't. Similarly, the thought of giving every bully from my middle school access to a machine god programmed by Mark Zuckerberg does not make me hopeful for the future of our civilization.
Hard Fork
Casey of Platformer fame compared Zuck's proposed proliferation of "superintelligence" to the dragons in House of the Dragon, a show I've never watched but I think I see his point. These dragons, a kind of super weapon in their own right, suddenly became available to far more people than before. Everyone suddenly became the "good guy with a gun" (or dragon) and it becomes evident that the vast majority of people are simply not equipped to deal with the magnitude of that power. Similarly, if I made a list of all the people that I know who should have access to the ability to create novel bioweapons or cybersecurity exploits, it would be a short list.
Me, Justin
I love these examples because even with the dragons, the ideas are almost universally understandable. Anyone with a pulse and any genuine experience living in and around other people can immediately understand that regardless of how you feel about AI or what it can do, what Mark is describing is not just stupid, it is reckless accelerationism for the sake of a few clicks.
These were not the first things that came to mind for me though. I did not think of guns, lawyers, bombs or dragons.
I thought of genies.
Specifically, I thought of the incredible graphic novel Eight Billion Genies from Charles Soule and Ryan Browne. It's a remarkable piece of both writing and artwork and the premise is scarily applicable to what we see here.
If you had one wish...what would you wish for? Now, what if everyone else had one wish too? That's EIGHT BILLION GENIES, the new eight-issue series from CHARLES SOULE & RYAN BROWNE (CURSE WORDS). At exactly the same moment, everyone on earth gets a genie and one wish. All hell breaks loose, in a very entertaining way...and that's just the beginning. Buckle in for the wildest ride of the year
As with guns, dragons, nukes and robot lawyers, the impact of the genies is nearly instant and devastating. As you can imagine, the world devolves into chaos and new systems and processes and cultures are born to help humanity make the most of this new, insane reality. The most powerful example I can give you of what happens following their appearance is actually in the framing device of the book. The story is bracketed around how much time has passed since the genies appeared. So rather than Chapter One, Chapter Two, etc. the story uses The First Eight Seconds, The First Eight Minutes, The First Eight Days, The First Eight Weeks, etc. to show the fallout of the genies and their wishes.
- SPOILERS BELOW FOR EIGHT BILLION GENIES -
It is not the passage of time that makes Eight Billion Genies feel powerful or prescient in the face of the "nukes for everyone" AI discourse. It is what accompanies these demarcations in time.
It is the corresponding human population.
The First Eight Seconds
Human population: 8,000,000,000
The First Eight Minutes
Human population: 7,999,000,000
(1,000,000 dead)
The First Eight Days
Human population: 6,000,023,047
(1,999,976,953 dead)
...
You get the idea.
Soule and Browne rightly recognize that this kind of "power" is a form of wish fulfillment, both literally and figuratively. We have overwhelming evidence that humanity writ large is so ill-equipped for this kind of power, regardless of the medium, that it is almost guaranteed to end in catastrophe.
Whether you think the potential of AI is analogous to a genie, or a dragon, is kind of irrelevant because the point is that Mark clearly believes it is this powerful, or will be. Meanwhile, the entire history of human knowledge and collective lived experience tells us that regardless of the vibes, this is a cataclysmically bad take. The "superintelligent lawyer" for everyone argument, just like the "good guy with a gun" argument, is the work of someone with a fundamentally broken understanding of how the world works, doing their best to codify it into something they can understand and ultimately control.
People like Mark Zuckerberg are so insulated from the human experience by wealth and power that they simply cannot fathom a reality where everyone does not have their resources, lawyers and escape hatches.
These people should never be given the keys to our collective clown car because they cannot comprehend a crash in which others walk away unharmed while they do not, and that makes them shitty drivers.