Past as Prologue

It was a simple enough question, tacked on to the end of a LinkedIn post.

What do you think [about "A.I."]? Tool, teammate… or takeover? (As in "take over the world.")

"Takeover" isn't a noun so I'll substitute in "Tyrant" instead, to retain the alliteration. And for me, the question is a false trinary... because tools can very easily become tyrants. And this is nothing new.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men notes that "commodities," as in the tools and implements that people created to make their lives easier, became "the first yoke they imposed on themselves without thinking about it, and the first source of the evils they prepared for their Descendants."

And in Walden, Henry David Thoreau observes: "But lo! men have become the tools of their tools." Or, in a more modern wording: "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us."

Mr. Rousseau believed that the amenities, advancements and conveniences of technological progress "soften body and mind," on their way to becoming "true needs;" things that we can't live without. And he was right; I'd probably be in much better physical shape if I had to walk or ride a horse everywhere I went, and I'm sure my mind would be sharper if I had to commit things to memory as opposed to writing them down (or typing them out). Although, to be sure, technology can become a genuinely true need; many of us alive today wouldn't be were it not for the modern technology that's interwoven into multiple, if not all, facets of our lives. And there's no real reason to presume that generative automation, and genuine artificial intelligence, if it arrives, won't also become something that, either figuratively or literally, people can't live without.

But there's also the fact that in the modern world, we have people pushing to make new technologies indispensable, because that's how they earn their livings. The switch from perpetual licensing to subscriptions in software is an example. It's gone from an innovation to a requirement; investors demand to see that companies have ways of creating recurring, consistent revenue streams. Companies shape their tools, and thereafter their tools shape them, too.

So yes, I expect that, sooner or later, generative automation, or whatever follows it, will become a tyrant. It's in the nature of technology to become so. We are already yoked to a lot of the technology that underlies our society, and it's invisible (and often unappreciated) until it stops working for some or another reason, as Mr. Rousseau said: "these commodities had lost almost all their pleasantness through habit, and as they had at the same time degenerated into true needs, being deprived of them became much more cruel than possessing them was sweet; and people were unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them." (I've noticed this habit in myself, and now take pains to remind myself to be happy to possess them.) In much the same way that cellular phones had gone from rare markers of status to near-universal ubiquity over the span of a couple of decades, generative automation/A.I. will become something that introduces efficiencies to people's lives such that it will become unimaginable how people ever got by without it.

And at that point, we will be its tool, just as much, if not more, than it is ours. And the transformation to tyrant will be complete.