All that you have is stolen

In one of the climactic scenes in the first season of Pluribus, Apple TV’s excellent new sci-fi series, the character Manousos Oviedo utters the unforgettable lines:

“Nothing on this planet is yours. Nothing. You cannot give me anything because all that you have is stolen. You don’t belong here.”

There is a deep disconnect between the current gatekeepers of AI and those expected to use AI, and the gulf appears to be widening by the day. For every AI evangelist, there are at least two Manousoses, and it would be doing us all a disservice to attribute their AI scepticism primarily to fear or phobia.

If you dig deeper into that mistrust, people are often upfront about it. What they don’t trust isn’t necessarily the current technology. Many people understand the limitations of generative AI, which is that as it stands, the output is only as good as the input and the amount of data it’s scraped from the collective knowledge of humanity (we’ll get to that in a minute).

What people don’t trust is those in power – the gatekeepers – and their intention, and at the heart of this is a philosophical question: what do we owe each other?

It’s a question that’s been percolating for the best part of the last six of the most confronting years we’ve ever collectively faced in living history. Pandemics, new and escalating wars, nuclear threats, the first real impacts of climate change and now….AI, which any average person with a laptop and access to the internet can immediately sense isn’t the pre-packaged solution to all human ills it’s being sold as.

In the doomsday scenario, we're facing mass unemployment over the next few years, even as workers are forced to train the artificial intelligence supposed to replace them – with no government seemingly having the wit or will to step in and make a plan. The future, for anyone alive but most especially anyone under 40, looks pretty bleak from certain angles.

Every dystopia, of course, has an equal and opposite utopia.

The true believers will argue that AI can uplift humanity, freeing us from the drudgery of dull, repetitive, mind-numbingly boring administrative work. In the techno-utopia, all of us are creatives and strategists – AI serving as the digital underclass doing all the coding, spreadsheeting, calculating, planning and scheduling that most people dread. The human mind, freed from the shackles of pivot tables, will then be put to use solving all of our most pressing issues. A utopia indeed.

It’s worth remembering that the Utopia Thomas More referred to in his satirical novel is fiction. The translation of the name from its original Greek is “nowhere”. More’s Utopia, perhaps a reflection of the year it was published, also depended on slavery, spirituality, and the continued subjugation of women to survive. In that sense, the closest to that 1516 Utopia we’ve come is probably modern day Afghanistan.

So, back to what do we owe each other – because that’s the bigger question sitting behind the issue of trust in AI. And underneath that question, the refrain that’s growing louder: “all that you have is stolen”.

Across all cultures, the things people want out of work and life are remarkably similar. In the words of Norman Kirk, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, “they have to have somewhere to live…food to eat…clothing to wear…and something to hope for.”

That last part is what’s been missing in all the noise about AI and potential and utopias. We cannot build utopias on stolen property. Large language models are ‘trained’ on datasets which were originally created by someone. They are trained on the products of human intellect – books, speeches, letters, emails, maps, paintings, photography, sculptures, ad campaigns, history, music, recorded conversations – most of it taken without asking, paying or crediting the people who made it.

What these models can produce is remarkable because humans are remarkable.

Yet the benefits being spoken about does not match with what most people want and will, at its current trajectory, be spread out unequally across societies and social classes. And we, the workers, are expected to not just be ok with it, but in some ways, to champion our own demise.

What do we owe each other? Hope – the real kind, not the Utopian ideal. And if we can articulate what that looks like, and show tangible proof we're working towards it in a way most people can understand and relate to, then we can look at slowly earning trust.

So what do governments, private industries and AI companies plan to do about it? Because how they answer the question is what will determine what sort of future AI has.

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