intellect on tap

Imagine that tomorrow morning people start driving out to the datacenters. Not as a metaphor and not as a protest with signs and a permit, but actual people with actual crowbars walking through a fence in some field in Ireland or some stretch of desert in Arizona to pull the racks out of the wall, because the reasoning holds together perfectly if you are standing inside it: the machines took the work, the machines are in that building, so go to the building. And while they are doing that, every feed and every magazine is pushing the machines harder than they have ever pushed anything, all the way up to the cover of Time, where the person of the year is an artificial intelligence.

Around 370 BC, Socrates refused to write anything down because he was certain that writing would destroy memory and leave people with the appearance of wisdom instead of the thing itself. The only reason we know he said it is that Plato wrote it down.

In the 1470s, the scribes of Europe pointed out, correctly, that a book made by a machine would have none of the care of a book made by a hand, and within a generation their guilds were gone. Everything anyone has read since exists because they lost that argument.

In 1811, weavers in Nottingham walked into the workshops at night and broke the frames, and they were not stupid and not frightened of the future in some vague way, they were correct about the specific thing happening to them, because the work did disappear inside their own lifetimes. Their grandchildren lived in a world with more of everything than any of those men could have described if you had given him a year to try.

In 1900, New York ran on roughly two hundred thousand horses and on the entire economy of stables, feed merchants, farriers and drivers built around them, and every one of those trades was gone within thirty years. The city that replaced them was not poorer.

In the 20th century, the word computer meant a person, usually a woman at a desk with a pencil working a trajectory by hand alongside a room full of others doing the same, and that is how the arithmetic that put people on the moon actually got done. By the 1970s the machine had taken both the job and the name, and teachers were arguing in public that cheap calculators would raise a generation unable to do arithmetic in their heads, which turned out to be true and to cost us almost nothing.

In 1983, Time could not bring itself to give Man of the Year to a beige box with sixty four kilobytes of memory, so it invented a new title and called it Machine of the Year, and inside that issue people worried, in language you could paste into a group chat today without anyone noticing anything strange, that the thing would eat the jobs and hollow out the mind. That box is in a landfill now, and the generation it was going to hollow out is running the companies.

In 1997, when Deep Blue beat Kasparov, serious people wrote that chess was finished as a human pursuit. There are more people playing chess today than at any point in the history of the game.

Through the 2000s, teachers told students that Wikipedia was not a real source and could not be trusted, and the students used it anyway and turned out fine. Those same teachers check it before class now.

Every one of those panics was correct about the small thing and wrong about the large one, and the weavers are the clearest case, because the trade genuinely died and the men who lived through it genuinely suffered for it, and yet the thing everyone was actually frightened of, which was that there would be no work left for human beings at all, has not happened once in two hundred years of people being certain that this time it would.

What happens instead is that the ceiling moves. Before electricity the maximum force a single person could put behind a day of their life was a horse, or a river if they were born beside one, or other people, which is what a great deal of history quietly means when it says power, and nobody in that world would have believed you if you told them that every ordinary person in a city like mine would one day have hundreds of horses waiting in a hole in the wall for the price of nothing. And now that we all have it, most of us use it to charge a phone and keep the light on, which is fine, because the point was never that everyone becomes extraordinary, the point is that the floor came up underneath everybody.

You can see the same shape in walking. We built escalators and cars until it became possible to go through a day without your legs doing anything difficult, and partly the pessimists were right, because obesity has climbed for decades and nobody serious disputes it. And at the same time human beings are running faster than they ever have in recorded history and the records keep falling, because removing the necessity of an effort does not remove the effort from the world, it moves it from something you are forced to do into something you choose to do, and the people who choose it go further than anyone did back when everybody was forced.

Force arrived on tap and a few people used it to build everything outside your window. Calculation arrived on tap and a few people used it to put other people on the moon. Reasoning is arriving on tap right now, and the split will look exactly the same.