They Built the Park Now They're Hiding in the Kitchen

 

There is a scene in Jurassic Park that seems spot on for our situation, where the algorithm is concerned. 

The chaos theorist, the one who was right from the beginning is played by Jeff Goldblum. He sits across from the park's creator and says "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

Hammond waves it off. He's proud. He built something extraordinary. The miracle is real. The problems are manageable.

Then the raptors get out.

Remind you of anything.

I have been watching the AI companies with their press releases and TED talks. The carefully worded statements about safety and responsibility and the tremendous potential for human flourishing. The interviews where the founders look just slightly haunted by uncertainty. They look like they heard something moving around in the dark outside the building.

The miracle is real. They built it. It works. And now they are in the kitchen, backs against the door, listening.

Here’s what I mean.

The engineers who built systems capable of writing legal briefs, generating propaganda at massive scale, and impersonating human voices with enough accuracy to fool grieving relatives. Those same engineers are now publishing essays about the risks of AI. They are testifying before Congress. They are forming safety institutes and signing open letters and going on podcasts to explain, carefully, that this is all very complicated.They're not wrong that it's complicated.

What they are is late.

You don't get to build the thing that gets out of the enclosure and then position yourself as the expert on containment. I guess you do, apparently, because that is exactly what is happening. But when you do that, the rest of us are allowed to notice.

Hammond's mistake wasn't greed, exactly. It wasn't stupidity. It was a specific kind of hubris that intelligent people are especially prone to. It's a belief that because you understand the mechanism, you control the outcome. He could explain the DNA sequencing. He could not explain the raptors.

The AI founders can explain the transformer architecture. They cannot explain what happens when three billion people outsource their thinking to it over the next decade. They have models for capability. They do not have models for what happens to a species that stops practicing being itself.

Nobody does. That's the point.

 This is not a screed against technology. The internet is not going anywhere. AI is not going anywhere. The question was never whether to build the park. The park exists. You are standing in it right now, reading this on a device that knows more about your attention patterns than your closest friend does.

The question is whether you wander around it as a tourist or whether you understand what kind of place you are in, without illusion. 

The raptors are not evil. They are not malicious. They are simply doing what they do, efficiently and without emotion, in an environment that was built to make that easy.

The algorithm is the same. It does not hate you. It is not trying to destroy you. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do. Hold your attention long enough to sell it to someone else. It is very good at this. It was built by very smart people who were very preoccupied with whether they could.

We have been here before.

In 2004 we watched a man eat McDonald's three times a day for a month and we were horrified. A year later someone did the same experiment, made reasonable choices, and lost weight. Nobody saw that documentary. Making good choices is not dramatic enough to be interesting.

But over the next twenty years we figured it out anyway. Not by banning fast food. Not by pretending it was fine. By understanding what it was, what it cost us, and teaching our kids to make better choices around it. The culture shifted. Not through fear. Through information becoming normal.

We are ten years behind on this. Still in the horror story phase. Still waiting for someone to tell us whether to be scared or not.

The three questions are simple. Because complexity is often how the enclosure gets rebuilt around you before you notice.

Who made this?

Who benefits from my attention?

What do they want me to feel?

These are not questions the park wants you to ask. The park wants you to enjoy the tour. Look at the dinosaurs. Isn't that amazing. Please stay on the path.

The scientists are still hiding in the kitchen. The tour is still running. The gift shop is open.

You already know where the exits are. The question is whether you care to use them.