Prometheus and GPT
Confronting the tension between withholding and democratizing the latest civilization-shaking technology
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Prometheus was a titan in Greek mythology responsible for creating humans and gifting them the power of knowledge — including fire.
Now, the gods of Olympus — particularly Zeus — saw humans as a threat and preferred that they be kept in a primitive state and ordered Prometheus to remove their knowledge of fire.
But Prometheus defied Zeus.
Humans kept their knowledge of fire.
Prometheus was thus harshly punished.
In the mid-2000s, Prometheus — eventually having broken free from his punishment — came to the aid of humanity and gave us the ability to connect and communicate with any other human on the planet, through the internet —democratizing power that had been consolidated by gatekeepers who owned and controlled the means of publishing and distribution.
This power could be enjoyed by anyone who participated in “social media”.
In recent years, those gatekeepers — just like Zeus before — have come to lament the societal upheaval that Prometheus caused by giving that power to us.
But Prometheus wasn’t done.
Just last week, on March 14, Prometheus delivered to us GPT-4 and kicked off an arms race (or perhaps a minds-race?) among the largest digital and social media platforms.
Humans now have both the ability to instantaneously connect and communicate with any other human on the planet, AND the ability to communicate with an emergent intelligence that has learned from our books, our articles, our websites — and from hundreds of years of our recorded media.
Humans — with a little help from Prometheus — became Zeus’s greatest fear and grew too powerful for the gods to control.
Indeed, we have now overthrown Zeus by engineering our own techno-Gods.
Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
In August 2007 I wrote up the proposal for what would later become known as “the hashtag” — suggesting that we could use specially formatted words or phrases to label content on social media…
