Editor’s note: I’m in the habit of bookmarking on LinkedIn, books, magazines, movies, newspapers, and records, things I think are insightful and interesting. What I’m not in the habit of doing is ever revisiting those insightful, interesting bits of commentary and doing anything with them that would benefit anyone other than myself. This weekly column is an effort to correct that.
For those of us that work in or adjacent to the tech industry, AI is everywhere. For everyone else, AI isn’t quite everywhere yet but the modern Ozymandiases of big tech are working round the clock to put it in your hands and your homes because we live in the age of surveillance capitalism. Personal data is the new oil, so they say, and for the AI money printer to go brrr, we’re going to need lots of oil — ideally gotten for free from AI illiterate masses who will gladly exchange agency and conviction for the numbing comfort of not having to make decisions or actually know things.
This week the Trump Administration announced its AI Action Plan as a few masters of the universe looked on. You can read about what’s in it courtesy of my colleague Kelly Hill. What I’m more interested in is what’s not in it. No mention of the AI alignment problem — that thing where we make sure the tools we develop serve people in a way that reflects our common values. What’s also not in it is any mention of containment — that thing where we make sure the tools we develop don’t break our already fragile and polarized economic and social constructs.
Mustafa Suleyman, one of the co-founders of DeepMind, currently the CEO of Microsoft AI, and otherwise a luminary in the field of deep neural networks, wrote a book published in 2023 called “The Coming Wave.” It’s all about how the combination of AI and synthetic biology will fundamentally change the world we all live in, and an exploration of the bad, the good, and everything in between. The first chapter is titled, “Containment Is Not Possible,” which is a bit of a grim harbinger of our present and likely our future reality.
Why isn’t it possible? Because of the “unstoppable incentives” pushing the whole thing forward. Those incentives are “national pride [and] strategic necessity” and the “arms race” that flows from nationalism and geopolitical/economic strategy. Then of course there’s our old friend capitalism. Then there’s ego, perhaps the most deeply-rooted and least containable incentive of all.
One of the key points Suleyman makes is that previous global diffusions of new, general-purpose technologies have not been contained at all, ever, with the exception of nuclear weapons which somehow have been contained through complex, massive, global efforts generally designed to keep us from destroying humanity. You’re all hopefully familiar with the broad strokes of the Manhattan Project and have likely heard project chief Robert Oppenheimer’s take on witnessing the Trinity test detonation: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
You maybe haven’t heard commentary from his colleague John von Neumann that speaks to the aforementioned “unstoppable incentive” of ego. “What we are creating now is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left, yet it would be impossible not to see it through, not only for military reasons, but it would also be unethical from the point of view of the scientists not to do what they know is feasible, no matter what terrible consequences it may have.”
Bleak. True, but bleak. But also not new or original. It’s simply a reflection of the deeply rooted tension between hope and hubris that’s so uniquely human and is now being reframed in this age of AI which is certainly artificial, arguably intelligent, and potentially a dark entry in our species’ long history of doing the wrong thing despite knowing better.
This is the story of Icarus reaching toward the sun. It’s the story of Pandora and everything that came out of (and remained in) her mythological box. It’s the Tower of Babel, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Aesop’s frog and scorpion, Macbeth, and Prometheus. It’s Frankenstein and Scarface, ambition made flesh. You get the idea. This tension is so central to what it is to be a human that it forms the core of thousands of years of the stories we use to understand what it is to be a human. Hell, even Oppenheimer was cribbing from the Bhagavad Gita, itself a story about (in part) the warrior Arjuna coming to understand that his charioteer is Krishna, a supreme being in Hinduism, who goes on to explain the cosmic balance of good and evil, permanence and impermanence, and everything else that defines the conditions of modernity.
And it’s also the story of Ozymandias as told in 1818 by Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose own tragic story is one of — wait for it — hope and hubris. Here’s the sonnet in full:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The penultimate chapter of Suleyman’s book is titled, “Containment Must Be Possible.” In the final chapter, he proposes 10 steps: an Apollo program for safety; audits; buy time; critics should build it; profit + purpose; survive, reform, regulate; time for treaties; respectfully embracing failure; people power; [and] the only way is through.
“Nationalism, capitalism and science — these are, by now, embedded features of the world,” he wrote. “Simply removing them from the scene is not possible in any meaningful time frame…This is why we won’t say no. This is why the coming wave is coming, why containing it is such a challenge. Technology is now an indispensable mega-system infusing every aspect of daily life, society, and the economy…Containing technology means short-circuiting all these mutually reinforcing dynamics.”
The sculptors of our age are the tech CEOs focused on using AI to make as much money as they can as quickly as possible. Containment does not align with that goal. They’re steadily inscribing their ambitions in data centers instead of stone. And the “sneer of cold command” is still there. The “vast and trunkless” legs may be all that’s left after the coming wave crashes. Not to mix literary allusions, but hope is still there in Pandora’s box; after all the evils were released, it was the last thing that remained.
