In the perfect movie Blade Runner, the man on the left is about to get a very rude awakening.

The workers he cheated have come back to extract from him what he never gave them: their freedom.

In the movie, this scam, this grift, is dramatized through the allegory of genetically modified workers who are programmed to die at a young age, to be cheaply replaced.

That scam is a future that we are walking into.

Not because our new tools are inherently bad, but because they are in the hands of men who are obviously no good.

I’ve come to believe that AI has more in common with nuclear power than any other recent technology.

It has the power to reshape the world, literally, possibly for the worst.

But it can also be used to put the petrochemical states out of business and liberates us from their tyranny.

In other words, AI can be a nuclear reactor which provides cheap energy, or a nuclear bomb.

If AI is a nuclear weapon, as more than a few people believe, who would you trust with it?

These are the stakes of our day.

How can we remain free given the retrenchment of power, the pact between tech, capital and the scam artists and fascists who have taken control of the USA?

Well, for starters, this unholy alliance has declared AI a matter of national interest.

On that, I believe, we can all fully agree.

That is an opening, not a closing.

It’s an opening for a truly American, utopian future where literally no one has to work; where your worth is not a function of your value to a corporation, nor to the illiberal regimes they will gladly prop up.

nota bene on corporations: these “legal beings” are literally amoral creatures, programmed to disregard human suffering and optimize for shareholder value; they are our own monsters, gone amok.1

How could we create such a heaven on earth?

True utopians believe that no one is born to suffer. (A city on a shining hill.)

Men like Elon Musk and Donald Trump are knock-off’s. They allege that some people are born to lose and others are born to win.

With the tacit support of most US corporations, they are conducting domestic warfare and lawfare to dominate, if not eliminate, “inferior” ethnic groups and races.

Vain, insecure men, they claim that there are entire peoples whose genetic and/or geographic origins make them less than, inferior, animals.

In a world where some people are to be treated as less than, with the tacit support of the wealthiest Americans, the promise of AI will be broken.

It will be used like any other force multiplier to enslave, pillage, rape. As the PDFs show.

To liberate AI, we need to understand that no one is born to suffer. That pain can be healed. That the ego is a lie.

Designing minds

I have written here before that we can celebrate LLM‘s as crystalline reflections of our culture.

I mean this literally: every LLM is a giant library of our thoughts. Full stop.

To put a fine point on it: the company Anthropic literally tore apart thousands of physical books so it could more cheaply scan them. In the end, the result is the same: what it knows, we discovered.

What it may discover, is a needle in our haystack.

Every so-called Artificial Intelligence is really just Our Intelligence, our collective knowledge and wisdom as a species, with an easier to use filter or front-end interface.

Who designs these interfaces and who gets access to the best interfaces to this data are political, ethical questions that will determine just how south this moment can go.

Real Genius.

In our society, we often confuse being full of thoughts or thoughtful with being a genius.

For example, Musk is full of ideas. Seldom does he have a chance to fully implement them as he joins companies that are already genius ideas. (When he does put in his $.02 you get the Mars colony, the Cybertruck, the Grok pedophilic porn.)

As the history of ideas plainly demonstrates, being thoughtful is often a function of being wealthy: in the sense that only those people who have time and means to record their thoughts for their intellectual output.

Just as we know little about Shakespeares sister, we know less about Shakespeares laundress.

The root of the word genius is gene- "to give birth". 

Genius, which Shakespeare clearly had, is measured precisely by how much life it brings.

A genius idea is necessarily pro life.²

A thought that brings about more pain, friction, death, suffering is clever, at best. But it is never genius.

For this reason I am not worried that AI will replace us until it can truly serve us.

Whether or not we will be allowed to serve each other is a function of our ethics and politics. Not our technology.

For us to have liberating AI, the shackles that must be broken have nothing to do with physical models or scaling or even energy, but rather properly defining what it means to be human: being helpful to as many people as possible.

A tool for mass suicide? A means to hasten ecocide? Such schemes are patently bad ideas.

That we, in the USA, are proud of our ignorance and respectful only of money is why we struggle to have “nice things”.

To regain our footing we must reject capital as a virtue and enshrine creativity – the life givers and life savers, the nurses and midwives, the teachers and coaches – as our greatest value.