Is Sam Altman Gonna Save Us All?
Suppose you catch a ball. Your whole body braces for the impact of the ball by shifting its center of gravity, and of course you stretch your hand to catch. We learn this when we are very young, and if we would not, we would fall over each time that ball comes our way. At some point, it becomes a reflex and we don’t notice thinking about it at all. Sometimes though, a new kind of ball comes our way, and we need to learn how to shift our center of gravity for that specific kind of ball. Some balls come at us collectively, and they shift our collective center of gravity, the very way we organize as communities. An earthquake, climate change, a new kind of literacy: Such events cause us to reorganize in new and different ways, sometimes for a while, and sometimes permanently, for better or worse. The printing press, capital, DNA, networking: all these innovations radically changed the very way we organized ourselves, and if we did not adapt, we did not survive. Artificial intelligence radically redefines what human intelligence is, and we therefore need to redefine how we structure ourselves individually and as communities. While, as private persons we get to figure out how to define ourselves individually every day through small and big choices in the context of AI, reorganizing ourselves collectively takes a bit more work. So it makes a lot of sense for an AI company who seizes its own moment to redefine what it means to be human. OpenAI is a company that is ready to do this work. Because ChatGPT and their many other products so profoundly affect human intelligence they also seek to shift the center of gravity for humanity, the very way humanity organizes itself globally, economically, politically, and socially. At the core, OpenAI’s “Tools for Humanity” provide a passport for world citizens. This passport is tied to the unique shape of the iris of a living human being, proving simply that a human is human. That is necessary because so many manifestations of human activity are in fact made by machines. We need a way to show the difference, because the system itself is in fact a machine, and proven humans are its citizens. There is no nation state, there are no boundaries, there are no locations. There is only energy, information and computation, a kind of trinity that administers the exchanges of real people with each other and with machines, and the ethics of how it works best for everyone. By nature, this idea is both old and new: It is old like the diaspora, a curse that many displaced persons turned into a virtue through ethics. It is also brand new, because the ethics are not established by people enacting rituals and laws, but rather by machine protocols.
Worldcoin embraces this old and new duality in a striking way. The logo looks like a sideways Menorah, the ancient Jewish “Face of God” candelabra that was, according to Genesis, designed by God personally. It is meant to remind as that we are created in the face of God. It is also meant to remind us to protect our most spiritual values with worldly actions, to be strong in the world for what we believe in, even if we are scattered individuals across the globe protected by no nation. As democracies including Israel, the supposed homeland of the Diasporic people, are failing, a corporation that offers to create the tools for a true global diasporic community, Tools for Humanity.
The Menorah logo, according to TFH’s marketing literarture, references math, the globe, and “everyone” and claims to be spelling out “The world belongs to everyone” graphically. While that seems like a beautiful inspiration, the logo, with its reference to the Menorah, in fact goes deeper. Once we don’t lean the logo sideways but upright, it’s main features, symmetry and creativity, become more clear. The Menorah really is a kind of stylized and symmetrical almond tree styled lampstand fed by olive oil. It has seven individual lamps, which are all joined by branches mirrored across a central axis. There are many ways to interpret the Menorah, but the idea that the Divine brings a kind of ethics into all of creation is pretty central. It also unfolds from a base to a top, indicating some kind of healthy growth from the ground to the heavens, a connection between earth and heaven. It gives us all something to look up to, the Face of God.
The worldcoin logo is an implementation of this larger scheme. Instead of seven lamps, it only has five. Instead of pointing up to the heavens, it points from left to right. It’s a special case of the Menorah, one that tries not to invoke God, but the community of humanity and a lot of math to implement the ethics. So we are now, if we want to, a diasporic people cast across the globe, powered by machines, regulated by math, and bound by mutual respect for the part and the whole, the individual and our planet.
I like it. Of course, it all depends on how we actually execute on the potentional, and if Sam Altman is a present day Moses leading us out of the plagues of nation states or if he, OpenAI, or his investors turn on us. Even more, it depends on if we seize the opportunity to make things better for each other, in how we use these “Tools for Humanity”. It’s a great idea, and if and how it works is up to us, the diasporic world citizens. It’s going to take a lot of work, but there are far worse options that are equally hard to pull off. Even in 5000 years, it may be hard to tell how it all worked out.
