Until the batteries run out

Once upon a time when our ancestors climbed down from the trees, struggling with blood and sinew to improve their situation and develop a cohesive language, society, and understanding of the universe that surrounded them, did they ever ask what they were struggling for?

They probably did. They developed concepts to justify their work. Concepts like divinity, community, nobility, democracy, hope, morality, and religion.

Our ancestors wove paths through light and through darkness, finding their way through an unknowable history on a world in which their awareness was constantly assaulted by things they had never seen before.

We wandered through ages of enlightenment, and ages of darkness, blood flowed like rivers across the course of our history. We struggled, loved, protected, and died and have done so for millennia.

What was it all for? 

Right now, as we wander through another dark age characterized by growing political acceptance of different shades of war, crop failures and an overheating planet, the big new thing seems to be artificial intelligence and machines smarter than we are.

It’s as if our ancestors descended from the trees to begin a mission to replace all humanity with machines carved out of the substance of the Earth itself.

We’ve reached a historical point at which some anticipate the singularity. OpenAI has become shorthand for that singularity — however overstated the term, this is the company everyone means when they say, “the AI company.”

Which means, if you’ll grant the terms of this argument, that what OpenAI does next can stand in for what humanity’s whole strange journey was building toward. Ten thousand years of fire, language, and grief, filed under a product roadmap. What will this great human achievement be?

Bloomberg says OpenAI’s Great Big Gift to humanity, once the lawsuits clear, is going to be a $300-$400 donut-shaped metal ring with camera, microphone, moving parts built to make it seem alive – trained to know you by reading your email.

A metal circle we can chat to.

It moves to pretend it’s alive, even as life on Earth continues to be wiped out, because dead objects don’t sell well. It reads your email, listens to your kitchen, and files all of it somewhere you’ll never see, under a privacy policy nobody has read because nobody has been shown one.

The end point of thousands of years of human history, arriving even as our planet breaks and its raw materials begin to disappear, is a metal donut packed with an intelligence built on incinerated books, seizing all of humanity’s knowledge to sell it back again. 

Until the batteries run out.

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