What We Think About
(With All Our Spare Time)
The Big Stuff (One day...)
One day, when we're in charge, everything will be different. The system will make more sense, and the system itself will be aligned with the people who need it.
We've been living through a time when the political and economic world in all it's forms is configured in such a way that is vastly abstracted from the sensible version that most of us think of - instead of trade between players with equal opportunity, we're mucking about in the leftovers of remaining policy flexibility, after the already-powerful have had their say.
It's always seemed like it shouldn't be this way, we always hoped that those systems would grow better over time, we had faith in that because believing in each other is believing in ourselves, and we simply must. We didn't want to be jaded, pessimistic, we wanted to give the benefit of the doubt, we wanted to believe that the people, and the world are inherently good, that would drive the positive change. We didn't count on the gall of the greedy, we didn't expect that they would be allowed to steal, consume, attack and push others down, someone would do something about it right?
So here we are, the world is... a place. We have some work to do, the mission, the cause. Thing is, we can't do that from poverty, from survival levels of income, whilst fighting each other. If you understand that, then you know that this is your recruitment, that this paragraph now is yet another call to action, that you are expected to act. We hope you find it in yourself to do so, took us a while. We hope that we can help you with your endeavours, whatever they may be. We hope that you find the wealth and the time and the support that you need to live a fulfilling and purposeful life, we'll be trying for the same, we can help.
Help With What Specifically?:
- Make it all go away (just the boring and tedius parts)
- Make it all make sense (your work, maybe the world, probably more the just work)
- You're smart, DO something - yep, on it
- Get me out of here (yes, computer your work, you go do life)
- I want to feel safe - we too friend, we too. (we will defend your new site against hackers)
Why are you like this? we hear you ask...
We've been alive long enough to have seen a few things already, we tried being very serious, limited success. This approach feels way better, seriously, look at this bit here where I just tell you exactly the truth of the matter, sooooo much nicer than "At CoproControl, we strive to make you part of our family..." spew.
The Less Interesting Stuff (That Makes Our Computers Good)
Tech bros have made it bad for the rest of us - not all geeks want to fund the shift into authoritarianism! The thing is though, there's a real chance that we're on to something here that could be used for good. There's huge corporations out there that buying up all the computers, all the electricity, all the water, but they don't know what to do with it yet, they haven't sold it to the people, they don't have a social license to use all of those resources.
One extremely valuable part of the tech industry is in open source software. What that part of our industry does, in effect, is level the playing field. Open software gives us all a change to compete with the big players, against those who are abusing their position, against those who hide behind excuses such as 'we are obliged to do this for our shareholders'.
What we found recently, since we have access to some incredibly powerful tools - in large part thanks to the open source movement/philosophy and to the collective contribution of thousands of individuals - is that when we have access to the collective experience of all human endeavour up until now, in the form of a large language model, or a search engine, we can create some incredible things with it. We've chosen to make software with it, we chosen to make that software very accessible, so that we can ALL benefit.
Yes, we are aware of the seeming hypocrisy - here's what we tell ourselves to help deal with it:
- A ncecessary evil, and a temporary one
- We must do better as soon as we're able
- We're too small to make a difference now through boycott
- We can only make a real difference if we grow
We're in a world right now where people are asking but not really asking "How will we make sure AI is aligned", thing is, aligned to what? We need to be an example, we need to understand ourselves, and we need to overcome the current imbalance so that we can describe, and live, a way of living that our AI should aspire to live up to.
We need to write some things down real quick, if someone from the future reads this, they're going to be asking questions.
Our time together is precious, celebrate with you soon.