Your Role in AI Story: The Sun, The Asteroid, or the Universe?

We all have a say in the future of artificial intelligence.

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Substack Reads

“Copyrighting a color, a chair affair, and the science of placebos.” I’m glad you found your way here, where the bread is always made by human hands.

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There is a way of telling a story that centers human knowledge, desire, and vision, a way that makes us the sun around which all other story elements rotate. This sun—we’ll call it ego—is a pulsing, fiery thing. It justifies every means.

There is another way of telling a story, one that’s more detached. It is an asteroid, hurtling through the atmosphere, set in motion by some invisible hand and continuing to Godknowswhere until it’s stopped by Godknowswhat. This divestment of both ego and agency is a nihilistic thing. It has no means to justify.

The truth of the story lies somewhere between the two cosmologies. It takes into account the universe of elements—stars, moons, planets, asteroids, black holes. It examines the history of the universe, and its origins, too. The story—the actual story—is that the sun is not the center of the universe and that sometimes, asteroids can be moved by human intervention.¹

A week ago Friday, I discovered that certain Artificial Intelligence systems (collectively, I’ll call them The Machine) devoured 183,000 books for training purposes, including my book Coming Clean: A Story of Faith. The Machine, a black hole, sucked in an entire universe of books, books by Anthony Doerr, Agatha Christie, Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury and

Tsh Oxenreider

. This copyright infringement of enormous proportions was a means to an end. The end? Building “thinking machines.”

On those machines, Nick Bilton, tech correspondent for Vanity Fair, wrote:

Thinking machines… are being built in a 50-square-mile speck of dirt we call Silicon Valley by a few hundred men (and a handful of women) who write in a language only they and computers can speak. And whether we understand what it is they are doing or not, we are largely left to the whims of their creation. We don’t have a say in the ethics behind their invention. We don’t have a say over whether it should even exist in the first place. “We’re creating God,” one AI engineer working on large language models (LLMs) recently told me. “We’re creating conscious machines.”²

“[C]reating God,” with a capital G (Bilton’s rendering, not mine)—could this be our modern Tower of Babel moment?

Every generation believes it stands at the crossroads of history. Each believes one path leads to Utopia, the other to Armageddon. Each sees this crossroads moment as a critical juncture in humanity’s ongoing story. But what happens when some members of a generation (“a few hundred men (and a handful of women)”) believe one road leads to Utopia while millions of others believe that same road leads to an erosion of humanity itself? Who gets to decide which road we choose?

There is a way of telling a story that centers human knowledge, desire, and vision. This is the sun story shared in Silicon Valley boardrooms. There is another way of telling a story, one that believes we are passive movers. This is the story shared over diner tables in middle America. Too many of us—the Silicon Valley types and the diner table coffee drinkers—have accepted our cosmological stories. But we are neither the sun nor an asteroid. We are neither God’s creators nor passive players in his universe. We are discrete actors, each with the agency to move, act, speak, write, light fires, and throw fists when needed. If those of us outside Silicon Valley want a say in the future of AI—including whether or not they infringe upon our literature, art, and music to feed their machines—now is the time to exercise that agency.