The Future We Can Answer For

On September 12, 1962, John F. Kennedy stood at Rice University and spoke of going to the Moon. He was asking a country to commit to a difficult achievement that had not yet been made. The destination was visible. The means of reaching it still demanded invention, testing, money and sustained work.¹

A person could have stood up and said that no one had yet demonstrated an American landing on the lunar surface. That person would have been correct and would have missed the purpose of the speech.

An ambition is supposed to reach beyond a completed fact.

Kennedy did not make the engineering problems disappear by speaking. His words helped name a task large enough to organize effort around. The effort still had to be done. That is the relationship between vision and responsibility that interests me.

We need a vision of AI that can call us toward something worth doing. A vision with enough moral weight to compete with the easy pictures of catastrophe. We should be able to imagine a world in which greater intelligence reduces helplessness, and then ask what must be built to approach it.

I am not satisfied with a future in which a small number of people gain extraordinary power and everyone else is offered a subscription. I am not satisfied with a politics that sees the danger in that arrangement and responds chiefly by asking us to remain less capable. We can demand more of ourselves.

Build the power. Learn how to govern it. Give people a claim on it. Use it to make the conditions of human life better than the ones we inherited.

That is a moonshot worth taking seriously.

The scale of the wish

Let us allow the thought to travel.

We learn to write instructions that make a machine perform a task. We learn to search a larger space of possible instructions. We become better at modeling structures, predicting their behavior and checking what the model says against the world. Each success opens further questions.

Now ask what we could attempt with much stronger powers of understanding.

Look at a disease that takes memory from a person. Look at a damaged heart. Look at a child born into a body whose suffering no one chose. Look at a town that cannot obtain clean water reliably, while elsewhere extraordinary resources are spent on conveniences that barely change a life.

What if more of these conditions could be altered?

I mean altered at their roots, where that becomes possible. Not merely made easier to endure. Or shall I say, we should do both: relieve suffering now and search with real determination for ways to prevent it. A society need not choose between caring for the person in front of it and pursuing the knowledge that could spare someone else the same pain.

Now follow the thought further. Better understanding of biology could change what it is possible to repair. Better understanding of materials could change the cost of storing energy, cleaning water or building a home. Better tools for inquiry could allow more minds to contribute to questions that have remained beyond their reach.

A person who hears only fantasy in that chain should tell us where the inquiry ought to stop and why. Which question should remain unasked? Which ability should we decline to investigate? We will not get every hoped-for result. That has never been a sound reason to abandon the work of finding out.

There is a peculiar imbalance in our imagination when it is permitted to travel without limit toward destruction but must show a receipt for every step toward hope.

We should examine both directions with care. We should also remember that a good future is partly a project. Its probability can depend on what people decide to fund, study, build and defend. A vision can help bring a possibility into reach by changing the work undertaken now.

The future is not only something to forecast. It is something to participate in making.

The old stories give us archangels and fallen angels, powers that can guard life or turn against it. There is a human temptation in those stories that grows more urgent as our reach expands. Power can learn to serve. Power can fall in love with its own height.

The same brilliance can stand beside the vulnerable or look down on them.

A walk through the morning

Come with me into a city we have not yet built.

The clinic opens early, but the queue no longer curls around the block. A woman enters with a worry she can describe in the language of her childhood. She does not have to choose between being understood and appearing educated. The people and tools around her work together to find out what is wrong. When the answer is uncertain, the uncertainty brings more attention rather than dismissal.

Across the street, a man who once struggled to speak is arguing about football. He is impatient with a friend’s opinion. That ordinary irritation is part of the victory. His life is larger than the technology that helped return his voice.

A father watches his daughter prepare for school. A condition that once would have narrowed her future is now something the family can manage without surrendering its whole life to fear. The morning is untidy. Someone has misplaced a shoe. The father is late. Progress has restored to them the privilege of having small problems.

In the research center, a young scientist follows a question that would once have been dismissed as too costly to pursue. She comes from a country that did not own the largest computing facilities. It no longer needs permission from one distant firm to contribute knowledge. Shared resources, local expertise and patient funding have given her work a place to begin.

The water system beneath the street is watched carefully. Leaks are found before they empty a reservoir. Repairs are planned before a neighborhood spends another week carrying buckets. New materials and better operations have changed what the city can afford to provide. The public can inspect the cost and ask why one district still waits longer than another.

At a workshop, a small manufacturer tries a design that once would have required a team far beyond its budget. A useful idea is no longer stranded because its maker lacks every specialist skill. The business still has to make something people want. It still has to keep its promises. It has a better chance to try.

A worker leaves early to care for her mother. She has wages, a portable capital account and a modest dividend. Her choices are not unlimited, but they are wider. When an employer asks her to accept degrading terms, she has enough room to refuse. Technology has helped make the economy richer, and the institutions around it have made some of that richness hers.

There is art in the city. Some of it is made with old methods and some with tools that would once have seemed impossible. People argue about it. They argue vigorously. They can distinguish a bad picture from a dishonest claim about a picture, and they do not treat either argument as a reason to close the workshops.

Children learn with patient help, then go out and test what they know against one another and the world. Teachers have more time for the moments that need a person. A child asks a question that the system has not answered well. The teacher does not silence the question to preserve confidence in the system.

And somewhere, in a room most visitors will never see, people are checking the tools on which these lives depend. Their work is funded. Their warnings are heard. They can stop an unsafe operation without having to become public heroes or lose their livelihood. When a system changes, the checking changes with it.

The city is alive because it can correct itself.

There are arguments at the council. There are mistakes, resentments, bad decisions and repairs. Heaven, if we are brave enough to use the word, need not mean that every human difficulty has been abolished. It can mean that we have ceased to treat avoidable suffering as the price of somebody else’s greatness.

It can mean that more power has become more room to live.

The other city

Now walk down the road.

The second city has powerful systems too. Its towers are taller. Its demonstrations are better. Every surface can speak to you in a voice designed to hold your attention.

The clinic knows more, but the help is priced beyond most people. The worker produces more, but has less power to refuse. The public office answers instantly, but no one can overturn the answer. The school measures every response and leaves the child with no space to be difficult in an unexpected way.

The government says the systems are safe. The companies say the government has approved them. A person asking for evidence is told that the matter is too complex to explain. A researcher who finds a problem cannot obtain enough access to determine its reach.

The city has become very good at continuing.

That is its hell. It can reproduce the same injustice with less effort. It can make dependence feel convenient. It can detect resistance before the people resisting understand what they have in common.

A dividend arrives, perhaps. It is small, conditional and described as generosity. It does not buy a right to inspect the system or leave it. The owners have learned that a little comfort can make a large inequality easier to maintain.

This is why a payment alone cannot complete the political work. Ownership, rights, public capacity and the power to challenge must travel together. A person can be paid and still be ruled.

Notice what separates the two cities. It is not simply that one has strong AI and the other does not. Both have it. The difference lies in what the power is for, who can direct it, how its failures are exposed and how its gains are shared.

A broad pause would not, by itself, write the institutions of the first city. It would not repeal the ambitions of the second. We must do that work directly.

The maker and the height

Lucifer is a useful figure for a civilization intoxicated by its own brilliance. The danger is not lack of intelligence. The danger is a power that can no longer imagine being answerable to anyone below it.

An archangel offers a different image: great capability held in service, strength that bends toward what needs protection. These figures give shape to a choice that runs through the whole book. What do we do when our reach expands?

Do we make more people dependent on our permission? Or do we make more people capable of living without asking it?

The choice enters ordinary designs. It enters a contract that allows people to leave. It enters a public fund whose accounts can be inspected. It enters a research program that studies neglected needs. It enters the decision to report a failure promptly rather than protect an announcement. Large moral worlds are assembled from choices small enough to be written into a budget or a line of policy.

That is where a declaration on behalf of humanity becomes something a person can live inside.

I want us to keep the larger image in view while doing the smaller work. Otherwise administration can lose its purpose. A committee may become very skilled at meeting. A safety program may become skilled at producing documents. A dividend program may become skilled at explaining why a payment is delayed. The institution survives while the person it was meant to serve disappears from its attention.

Return to that person.

Return to the woman who wants an accurate answer and a free evening. Return to the patient who wants more than a hopeful headline. Return to the worker who is asked to celebrate a gain that never reaches their home. Return to the young scientist whose best idea needs resources, not encouragement alone.

The moral claim of progress begins there. It must keep returning there as power grows.

In a working statement about my AI politics, I put the purpose this way: “I am not pro-AI because I worship machines. I am pro-AI because I want less helplessness in human life.”²

Less helplessness. There is the point.

Not a world in which no one ever needs anyone else. We will need one another. We should need one another. But a world in which fewer people are trapped by a problem that our shared intelligence could help them overcome. A world in which dependence does not have to become humiliation.

If our powers become extraordinary, our duties should become more ambitious with them.

The ascent

We saw two builders standing in the flame,
Each with a ladder rising toward the sky;
Each called the waiting city by its name.

The first climbed fast and would not turn his eye
Toward hands that held the ladder at its base.
He said the height itself would answer why.

The second stopped to make another place
For those whose shoulders bore the weight below;
He knew the climb was more than his own race.

The first could make a thousand windows glow,
Yet kept the switch behind a private wall.
The second asked where light had failed to go.

And from that question rose a different call:
To build a stair that many feet could climb,
To make the height a shelter meant for all.

The first had learned to measure human time
In units bought and sold beneath his throne.
The second heard the hours inside a chime

And thought of all the nights spent sick, alone,
Of names a failing memory could not hold,
Of children taught that lack was theirs to own.

He did not call their suffering a mold
For virtue, or a tax that life must pay.
He asked what greater knowledge could unfold.

A door stood where there had not been a way.
Beyond it lay a field no hand had sown.
He took the tools and walked into the day.

The first looked down. The highest rung was stone.
He found that all the ladders had grown still;
A heaven kept for one becomes a throne.

The second felt the weight of human will,
The choice to build, the duty to repair,
The courage to begin without the skill

Complete, but with the promise to prepare.
Around him rose the voices of the town;
The work was hard, and many came to share.

No angel carried all their burdens down.
They took the watch while tired children slept,
And left behind the hunger for a crown.

The dawn belonged to promises they kept.

The door we open

At the beginning of this book, Bacon’s imagined researchers decided which discoveries the world would receive. They had knowledge, discipline and a commitment to useful work. They also had a door the public could not open.

We should inherit their ambition and improve upon their politics.

The future should contain places of extraordinary inquiry. Build them. Fund them. Let people pursue questions whose value is not yet obvious to a quarterly account. Let them build tools that enlarge the reach of thought. Let them test those tools with a seriousness equal to their promise.

Then open the decisions around that work to the people whose lives it changes. Give the public more than a tour of the finished building. Give it knowledge, rights and institutions through which it can exercise power.

This is a harder program than a blanket yes or a blanket no. It has to distinguish the useful from the harmful, the promising from the proven, and an honest uncertainty from an excuse to avoid responsibility. It has to keep moving while retaining the ability to correct its direction.

It is also the program most worthy of the intelligence we hope to gain.

The critics are right to ask whether our institutions can handle greater power. We should answer by making the institutions stronger. The builders are right to point toward possibilities we have not yet reached. We should answer by helping turn the worthwhile possibilities into shared achievements, and by refusing to let the promise erase the people standing in the way of a convenient business plan.

I do not believe the moral task of our generation is to stand at the edge of possibility and congratulate ourselves for remaining still. The suffering already here makes that too easy a form of innocence. We should act, and we should become more capable of acting well.

That means some operations will stop. Some claims will fail. Some rules will change. A living program of progress can survive all of that. What it cannot survive is the belief that humanity must choose between knowledge without responsibility and responsibility without courage.

We have more choices than those.

We can accelerate the search for remedies and the tests that tell us whether they work. We can accelerate useful capability and the institutions that contain its dangers. We can build wealth and write broader claims on that wealth. We can imagine a world closer to heaven and then accept the ordinary, demanding work of making part of it real.

Do not ask only how fast the machine is becoming stronger. Ask how fast we are becoming worthy of the strength.

Then take hold of the tools.

The future does not yet belong to everyone. That is a reason to build it differently, and a reason to begin now.

Sources and notes