A twofer but it’s only appropriate for the topic. Baratunde Thurston and Blaise Agüera y Arcas gave a great conversation riffing on the current state of the world.
Baratunde started it off by talking about agency as a terminal value. Agency is often connected with capability: I can do more things thus I have agency. But it’s more about choice, community, and power: I can do more things but because I have agency I don’t have to do any of them. Or I can pick between them. You want to avoid a world where you must just do things.
Obviously AI is on the audience’s mind as he continued. He was quite blunt: it looks a heck of a lot like AI boosters are getting very excited by the prospects of lots of artificial workers they don’t have to pay or in other words “slaves”. This is emphasized with the nature of the discourse: it’s very much a dominance relationship of who’s going to control whom. You had the awkward moment a couple months back where folks were writing papers about how berating your LLM or threatening it would get it to perform better. And, of course, it’s not like AI-pilled folks are treating their human employees much better.
There are, fortunately, better ways of living. One hopes… both speakers were less than prescriptive here. But maybe that’s what we need: less top down mandates and more bottom up exploration and collaboration. The story here is important they argued: we need a different vision of our relationships and their inherent interdependence. I felt strains of Neal Stephenson’s Hieroglyph project wherein he argued that modern SF has fallen into a dystopian rut which fails to supply scientists and engineers a vision to build. We certainly see that dystopian bent now but even more so we have failed to provide an alternative narrative structure for technologies other than making a ton of money. And we’ve been reaping the product.
It was slightly awkward listening to a talk about the wonders of community and interdependence after driving through city traffic. Like yes it’s amazing that as a species we’ve built such amazing structures and machines, but goddamn does nobody understand a zipper merge? And to be fair Baratunde and Blaise agreed: it’s much easier in the abstract than in the particulars.
It was not all Pollyannaish though. Blaise continued his discussion from his prior Long Now talk on symbiogenesis: basically things get more complex over time as simpler things merge together. This is a useful corrective to the idea that AI somehow represents an entirely new kind of relationship between humans and technology. We’ve always been symbiotic with our tools. The question is what kind of symbiosis we’re creating now.
There is, after all, a potentially uncomfortable side of symbiosis. As we gain collective capabilities, we also trade away some individual ones. We don’t all need to know how to do everything ourselves. Indeed he compared humans to bees: individually quite dumb but in a group quite impressive. That’s part of the point of civilization: we specialize, build institutions, and rely on one another. On the whole, Blaise seemed fairly optimistic about how this trade has played out.
But this brings us back to Baratunde’s question about agency. Who controls that trade? Who decides which capabilities we lose, which new ones we gain, and who gets access to them? And what story are they telling themselves as they do it?