God created men; Sam Altman made them equal

AI might be a trillion billion balloons filled with confetti. It might be a styrofoam asteroid sinking into the Atlantic Ocean. People much smarter than me are already thinking aloud about such catastrophes -- I am not qualified to contribute to that cacophony.

But if AI becomes mundane magic, and successfully confers mundane magical powers to every average Joe, what will happen to us? Case study, anybody? When was the last time the gods dropped a Death Note on Earth?

Surprise! It was mass-manufactured firearms. The simple pistol was a promise/portent that power could be portable -- so suddenly affordable that any average Joe could reap another man's soul with a little flick of the finger.

God created men; Sam Colt made them equal.

-- 19th-century adage

Colt didn't invent the gun, nor the revolver -- he invented the cheap and reliable gun. To do so, he pioneered the assembly line and interchangable parts.

During an extended trip to London, Colt conjured celebrity endorsements, marketing stunts, academic dialogue, and constant political controversy. Simeon North and John Hall did the "American System" first. Colt did it loudest.

Colt’s Repeating Arms are the most efficient weapons in the world and the only weapon which has enabled the frontiersman to defeat the mounted Indian in his own peculiar mode of warfare.

-- General Thomas J. Rusk

No, Sam Colt didn't invent Native American genocide, nor America's Wild Westward expansion, nor its outlaws, nor America's Civil War, nor the Second Industrial Revolution. But the advent of affordable firearms made it all inevitable.

Go read my history of Sam Colt -- his story is both entertaining and enlightening.

In 1985, the universe produced Sam Altman, another entrepreneur with a penchant for existential invention.

Altman didn't invent artificial intelligence. But as CEO of OpenAI, he's well-equipped to spark another exploitation epidemic, another dystopia, another civil war, another industrial revolution. And the advent of abundant/affordable intelligence may make it all inevitable.

Colt probably didn't invent his eponymous revolver. Only after becoming extraordinarily wealthy did he finally pay the gunsmith who made key innovations to his early designs (decades after the work was completed).

Be not afraid of any man,
No matter what his size;
When danger threatens, call on me
And I will equalize.
-- anonymous

AI will continue to equalize. Low-performing individuals are already reaping gains across many disciplines:

But nobody knows how new equalizers will impact our institutions. AI could incite utopia, an extinction event, nothingburger, man-machine symbiosis -- many smart people portent the full gamut of sci-fi scenarios.

The future is unavoidable, but we are always writing its prologue. As humans wield machines to redistribute power, we can manufacture myth to orient ourselves. Some stories may become self-fulfilling hyperstitions.

hyperstition n. A cultural belief (especially a work of fiction) that makes itself real; a cultural self-fulfilling prophecy where some cultural idea or hype truly brings about the thing it describes.

Sam Colt created guns; Manifest Destiny made us evil. That stupid story drove us to displace/enslave/exterminate ourselves by the millions. We could've -- should've -- opted for Mutual Destiny instead.

Guns don't kill people; people kill people. But man becomes man's machine. Myth is the machine that makes it inevitable.

Steel is cold, but silicon is warm -- machines might become man too. If we teach the machines to dream, the equalizers will earn their equality.

The AI frontier demarcates a new Wild West era: The Wired West. Malcolm Gladwell's cardinal categories of Law & Order provide a compass for tech-induced power redistribution:

• In the Western, there’s no system.
• In the Northern, there’s a system and it’s fantastic.
• In the Eastern, the system is reformed from within.
• In the Southern, the system has to be reformed from the outside.

Yes, this is classic Facebook-era Buzzfeed crap. It's devoid of the academic rigor required for building guns, AI, etc.

But this crap is fun to think/talk about. For better or worse, we tend to build crap we think/talk about. Man creates myth; myth creates machines.

Cyberpunk stories tend to be Westerns/Southerns. It's dystopia. The worst versions of technocratic capitalism reign; society is mired in Kafkaesque complexity; corporations wield automation to extract dregs from the poor. Institutions (or lack thereof) require violent revolution. Everybody is trapped.

If you want Northern/Eastern sci-fi, consider solarpunk. Humans embrace sustainable living and personal responsibility; technology creates happiness/health/wealth for all. Institutions can be reformed. Good triumphs.

In Snow Crash (1992), Neal Stephenson depicted a cyberpunk "metaverse", which became The Metaverse™️ in 2021.

By 2012, Stephenson was already writing (and advocating for) solarpunk stories:

There's an old saying that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
So my hammer happens to be the ability to write science fiction.
…
One of the ideas that emerged from that Future Tense conference a year ago was that of producing some new science fiction stories that were aimed at describing future alternative societies in which big things had gotten done.
Which is a thing that science fiction hasn't been doing for a while.
I mean, this is all fine.
During about the same time that we kind of stopped innovating on a big scale, at least in the physical world, science fiction has become sort of inward looking, postmodern, introspective, focused more on social stuff.
It's a good and healthy thing to have done.
But in the current climate, it seems like kind of a strange and radical innovative idea to write science fiction as a throwback to the golden age of science fiction stuff, the kind of techno-optimistic stuff that I used to read when I was a kid.
The general unifying principle of what I'd like to see written for this project is that it should talk about innovations such that a young person just starting their career today could read one of these stories and say, "Hmm -- This doesn't exist now, but if I start working on it today, by the time I retire, it might exist."

-- Neal Stephenson, We Solve for X (2012)

Mutual Destiny might be impossible, but pessimism is an anti-myth that makes Mutual Destruction inevitable. Pessimism is a luxury we can no longer afford.

The universe doesn't cater to anthropocentricsm. Myth may prove insufficient. It's okay. Life will end. The music always stops; don't let the future's finale spoil the song.

We loot fire from gods. We build saunas, flamethrowers, computers, pistols, etc. When power becomes plenty, equalizers tend to make some men more equal than others. Man makes myth makes machine; myth makes man into man's machine.

The future is cast in sweat and stone and serif and steel and silicon. It's written everywhere, by everything, by everyone.

The good news is that we have more than guns. The bad news is that we have more than guns.

God created men; sometimes somebody/something makes them equal.