After receiving my Ph.D. in 1974, I left Utah with a nice little list of innovations under my belt, but I was keenly aware that I’d only done all this in the service of a larger mutual goal. Like my classmates, the work I’d championed had taken hold largely because of the protective, eclectic, intensely challenging environment I’d been in. The leaders of my department understood that to create a fertile laboratory, they had to assemble different kinds of thinkers and then encourage their autonomy. They had to offer feedback when needed but also had to be willing to stand back and give us room.

The Thinking Machine - Stephen Witt

Introduction:

“This is the story of how a niche vendor of video game hardware became the most valuable company in the world. It is the story of a stubborn entrepreneur who pushed his radical vision for computing for thirty years, in the process becoming one of the wealthiest men alive. It is the story of a revolution in silicon and the small group of renegade engineers who defied Wall Street to make it happen. And it is the story of the birth of an awesome and terrifying new category of artificial intelligence, whose long-term implications for the human species cannot be known. At the center of this story is a propulsive, mercurial, brilliant, and extraordinarily dedicated man. His name is Jensen Huang, and his thirty-two-year tenure is the longest of any technology CEO in the S&P 500.

Huang is a visionary inventor whose familiarity with the inner workings of electronic circuitry approaches a kind of intimacy. He reasons from first principles about what microchips can do today, then gambles with great conviction on what they will do tomorrow.

“Fundamentally, I want to work on AGI for the rest of my life,” Brockman told me.

He approached everything with this kind of intensity. He was hands on and detail oriented. He pulled long hours and all-nighters, consumed by the tasks in front of him. When he wasn’t working, he was still working to better himself. He read books about public speaking and negotiation, skills he believed would help him serve OpenAI’s mission. He was sheepish to admit that he also read books for fun—science fiction epics like The Three-Body Problem trilogy by Chinese writer Liu Cixin and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.

In their book Power and Progress, MIT economists and Nobel laureates Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson argue that every technology revolution must begin with a rallying ambition. It is the promise of a technology benefiting everyone that puts in motion the long journey of amassing enough talent and resources to turn it into a reality. After analyzing one thousand years of technology history, the authors conclude that technologies are not inevitable. The ability to advance them is driven by a collective belief that they are worth advancing. The irony is that for this very reason, new technologies rarely default to bringing widespread prosperity, the authors continue. Those who successfully rally for a technology’s creation are those who have the power and resources to do the rallying. As they turn their ideas into reality, the vision they impose—of what the technology is and whom it can benefit—is thus the vision of a narrow elite, imbued with all their blind spots and self-serving philosophies. Only through cataclysmic shifts in society or powerful organized resistance can a technology transform from enriching the few to lifting the many.

Finally, to redistribute power along our third axis, influence, we need broad-based education. The antidote to the mysticism and mirage of AI hype is to teach people about how AI works, about its strengths and shortcomings, about the systems that shape its development, about the worldviews and fallibility of the people and companies developing these technologies. As Joseph Weizenbaum, MIT professor and inventor of the ELIZA chatbot, said in the 1960s, “Once a particular program is unmasked, once its inner workings are explained in language sufficiently plain to induce understanding, its magic crumbles away.” I hope this book is just one offering to help induce understanding. It builds on the work of the many scholars, journalists, activists, and educators before me who have dedicated themselves to public education. May it be a new ground upon which many more after will rise up and build.