Pandora's Box

That’s what AI is, right? Pandora’s box. Open it and the miseries escape and afflict us. In the myth, only hope remained. Pandora was created on Zeus’s orders, with the gods all granting her gifts, one of which was curiosity. It was her curiosity, of course, that brought suffering to mankind.

By some reckonings—Elon Musk’s, for instance—with AI we are about to repeat Pandora’s folly. Naturally we are as curious as she was about what might be inside our magical box. Naturally we are going to look. And dare I say, without demeaning our judgment, or giving away the plot, naturally we are going to be unprepared for what we find inside.

Maybe it will be unimaginable abundance and leisure. Maybe, as Musk and others fear, it will be the extinction of humanity at the digital hands of our own creation.

The question, then, is how will we handle the surprises. If they are broadly shared abundance, no problem. If they are extinction, also no problem, at least none we can solve, because, you know, we’ll all be dead.

I suspect the ends of the spectrum of possibilities are not the likely result, as is usually the case in any probability analysis. In the middle of the range of potential outcomes, the possibilities are endless, but they all boil down to, and depend upon, how we get along with one another.

Will we compensate people we put out of work? Will we care for them and their families? Will we share the riches AI will almost certainly produce?

Most of us say we care for others, and many do, but often the people with the most generous impulses are not the ones with the biggest pocketbooks. Capitalism, some would say, works because of selfishness. Not every billionaire is selfish, but few of them seem to like proposals to tax their wealth. 

The sharing of the riches produced by AI has to come from taxes, or something like them, something compulsory. It can’t depend on voluntary charity that would almost certainly be insufficient in addition to being unguaranteed. Andrew Carnegie, the Gilded Age steel baron who dipped into his fortune to build 1,700 libraries, famously said he didn’t give his workers raises because they would just buy better cuts of meat and more drink for their tables.

Personally, I don’t predict utopia. We just don’t have a good track record as a species, particularly in times of stress, when it comes to taking care of anyone but those we are closest to. This is in or DNA, I fear, hardwired over centuries of paucity and threats from neighbors. 

Regrettably, we may end up with a much smaller population as those who no longer have the means to provide for themselves die off. Or we may end up with a great storming of the castle and then a smaller population made up of those who made the wisest alliances. Medicis and serfs.

In that case, at least art will survive, with, as always, the patronage of the rich who seek beauty and perhaps absolution. As I write this I am sitting at a stunning fountain in the Jardin de Luxembourg in Paris commissioned in 1630 by Marie de Medici, the widow of King Henry IV, designed in the style of the Italian Renaissance gardens of her childhood in Florence. The sculptures depict the cyclops Polyphemus in the moment he discovers Galatea, with whom he was desperately in love, in the arms of the handsome shepherd Acis. In a jealous rage, Polyphemus crushes Acis with massive boulder.