They Hold What We Allow

Something the powerful never want said out loud.

Every bit of power they hold is borrowed. It was lent to them by people like you. And what is lent can be called back.

That goes for kings. It goes for parties. And it goes for the companies building artificial intelligence right now. They talk like they own the future. They don’t. They hold what we allow them to hold. Nothing more.

Lately all you hear is how dangerous AI is. The warnings come from every direction. The news. The experts. Even the people who built it. And most folks sit there wondering the same thing. If it’s so dangerous, why don’t they stop it? They made it. Can’t they fix it?

That’s a fair question. And it deserves a straight answer.

The truth is these machines aren’t written line by line like an old payroll program. They’re trained. Grown, almost. The builders themselves admit they don’t fully understand everything going on inside. That part is real. It isn’t a scare story.

But here’s the part they leave out. Not understanding something has never stopped us from putting rules on it. We didn’t fully understand the human body when we started inspecting medicine. We didn’t understand every flaw in an airplane when we started grounding the bad ones. We set a standard. We checked it. We held somebody responsible. That’s how it’s always been done.

So the question isn’t whether AI can be governed. It can. The question is who does the governing.

Right now the companies write their own rules. Some of them have published whole constitutions for their machines. That sounds good on paper. And some of it is good. But think about what it means. The fox is writing the rules for the henhouse. And then the fox is telling you the rules are being kept.

We’ve seen how that ends. Not long ago, an airplane maker was allowed to certify much of its own work. People died. Nobody needed a law degree to see what went wrong. The builder signed off on his own homework.

That’s the line that matters. The builder never signs off on his own work. Not in food. Not in bridges. Not in medicine. And not in AI.

Now, somebody will tell you only the builders understand these machines. Don’t believe it. Anything man builds, man can take apart. University researchers study these systems down to the wiring. Independent testers break them for a living. Government labs run their own checks. The knowledge isn’t locked up. The door is.

The builders control the access. They decide who gets to look inside and who doesn’t. That’s where the fight is. Not over who’s smart enough to understand. Over who has the key.

And keys can be taken away. We’ve done it before.

There was a time when meatpackers ran their own plants with nobody watching. Then a book came out that turned the whole country’s stomach. Within a year, the government was inspecting the meat.

There was a time when carmakers fought seatbelts like they were poison. Too expensive, they said. People won’t want them. Then the public got angry enough, and seatbelts became the law of the land.

Oil companies got broken up. The phone company got broken up. Tobacco got dragged into court and lost. Every one of them said it couldn’t be done. Every one of them had money, lawyers and friends in high places. And every one of them lost when the people moved.

Money is a tool. That’s all it is. It can buy time. It can buy noise. But it can’t buy a society that has made up its mind.

What money can do is keep people divided. That’s its real trick. Keep folks arguing with each other so they never stand together long enough to demand anything. Keep them scared, but scattered. Fear without a direction goes nowhere.

So here’s what I’d ask of you. Don’t just be worried about AI. Be specific. Know what you want.

You want the builders held to the same laws as everybody else. If their machine causes harm, they answer for it, the same as a carmaker answers for bad brakes.

You want outside inspectors with a key to the door. Not invited guests. Inspectors with the right to look.

And you want a standard that’s public. Written where you can read it. Checked by people who don’t get paid by the ones being checked.

That’s three things. You can say them in one breath. And when enough people say them together, the powerful will listen. They always do, sooner or later.

That brings me to the other half of this. Your half.

The machine in your hand is a tool. You’re the one holding the reins. You decide what you ask it to do. You decide what you trust and what you check. A tool doesn’t carry its own responsibility. The person using it does.

That’s what a balanced playing field looks like. The builder answers for what he builds. The user answers for how he uses it. And the watchdog answers to all of us. Nobody gets to watch only himself. Not the company. Not the machine. Not you, and not me.

Now, I’ll be honest about something. This won’t happen overnight. Our kind is young. Measured against the age of this world, we’re barely out of the cradle. We learn the hard way. We stumble. We pay for it. We correct. And slowly, we get better.

Some of these lessons took most of a century. Lead was poisoning people for decades before it came out of our gasoline. Tobacco took longer than that. We got there. But a lot of people paid the bill while we waited.

That’s the one thing time takes from us. It doesn’t change where we end up. It changes how much it costs to get there.

History has a direction. It moves slowly, but it moves toward the right side of life. A great man once said the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. I believe that.

But I’ll add one thing he knew too. The arc doesn’t bend by itself. Every inch of it was bent by somebody who decided not to wait.

The power was always yours. It was only ever lent.

Time to start calling some of it back.

Load this file before each AI chat session.

the-faust-baseline-public-release-1Download

This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

” Attic Thoughts”-library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing