CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Bezos Stole the Fire, Nobody’s Home to Notice

When the article arrived in my inbox, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time — a frisson, that particular French shiver that sits somewhere between excitement and dread. Jeff Bezos had just announced that AGI had effectively shown up, and that he intended to harness it through his new venture, Prometheus, to produce what he was calling AGE: artificial general engineering. The pitch was expansive: a technology capable of designing everything from rocket ships to pharmaceutical compounds, opening up entire categories of human problem-solving that had previously been bottlenecked by the sheer limitation of human engineering capacity. Bezos stayed careful in his public remarks, but the implications were already leaking past the edges of what he’d said. Everything, it seemed, was now on the table.

The frisson took me back to Troy, New York, the mid-eighties, where I was a graduate student in philosophy at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute — an engineering school, emphatically, whatever the philosophy department might have preferred to believe. I was studying phenomenology, existentialism, and aesthetics, three disciplines that seemed to me then, and seem to me now, to be threads of the same continuous inquiry: how do we read reality, and how do we know the difference between that and the stories we tell ourselves about it? It was an odd place to be asking those questions. The campus around me was absorbed in systems, formulas, load-bearing calculations, thesis projects built to spec. Reagan had just begun his second term, trickle-down was being sold to a Democratic Party that had stopped bothering to resist it, and the engineering mind — confident, quantitative, sold on designed solutions — was the presiding sensibility of the age.

I lived with three engineers in a four-bedroom apartment. We talked shop at breakfast, which mostly meant I listened. What interested me — the ethical and theoretical dimensions of what technology was actually doing to human life — was not their focus, and they were under no obligation to make it so.

Then the Challenger went down.

On the RPI campus there was a pseudo-Gothic chapel — the kind of place where, a generation earlier, students would have filed in on Sundays, or Saturdays depending on denomination, observing whatever the liturgical calendar required. By the mid-eighties that was over. The administration had gutted it entirely — stripped the altar, stripped everything that had made it a sacred space — and converted it into a print center. You walked in under the original stained glass windows, which they’d left in place, and found yourself facing something resembling a newspaper press. Hand over the number your terminal had given you, and a clerk passed your document across the counter in a neat plastic envelope. The smell of toner under medieval light. God replaced by the laser printer.

They hadn’t thrown away the pews . They’d moved them to the student center, arranged facing each other with tables in between — church furniture pressed into service for pitchers of beer and a movie-sized TV screen on the wall. Most days, from mid-morning through the afternoon, it was MTV running on that screen. The new liturgy. The thing that had moved into the space the other thing had vacated. On the day the Challenger went down, the footage was running on a loop instead, and I was sitting alone in a salvaged church pew, working through a pitcher, eating pizza, watching the plume.

The engineers in the room were already arguing about O-rings. I sat there in that deconsecrated furniture and thought: this is what happens when the people who ask how stop talking to the people who ask whether.

This is what happens when the people who ask how stop talking to the people who ask whether.

Forty years later, reading about Bezos and Prometheus, I had the same frisson. We are back in the student center. The screen is running. The O-ring question is back — except this time, nobody in the room knows what to ask about it.

I wrote a piece some time ago for The Conversation asking whether we would even recognise the singularity when it arrived — whether the moment machine intelligence eclipsed our own would announce itself, or simply accumulate around us until we looked up and found ourselves already inside it. Worth your time. The singularity was supposed to be a 2030s problem. Bezos did not get the memo.

I. The Fire This Time

Prometheus, in the Greek telling, was the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mortals — not merely the fire that cooks meat and keeps away wolves, but the fire of the mind itself: the capacity for ideas striking against each other like flint, for the leap from observation to invention. Kubrick encoded the same fire in the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey — that black rectangle standing in the African dawn, humming at a frequency the proto-humans can’t quite name, until one of them picks up a bone and understands, for the first time, what it is for. The monkey bashes the head of the competing monkey at the watering hole. Cut to a spacecraft tumbling in orbit. Four million years compressed into a single edit. That monkey — the one who understood leverage before anyone else did — could have been Bezos. Could have been Musk. Could have been Gates. The technology changes. The dynamic does not. Be-bop.

Prometheus has a shadow story, one the West has been carrying alongside it just as long, and it runs through the Garden of Eden. The tree Adam and Eve are forbidden is not the tree of life. It is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The moral dimension is built into the prohibition itself. You may know, but the knowing comes bundled with consequence, with exile, with the weight of living inside the distinction between what you can do and what you should. That is the deal. That has always been the deal.

What Bezos has named Prometheus is that same tree — with the moral clause stripped out. AGE is Promethean fire delivered by a trillionaire to the physical economy, with JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs as the angels at the gate, and no cherubim with flaming swords anywhere in sight.

AGE is Promethean fire delivered by a trillionaire to the physical economy, with JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs as the angels at the gate, and no cherubim with flaming swords anywhere in sight.

We lost track of the mythology somewhere along the way. Stopped telling ourselves the story and went straight to the products, the updates, the Moore’s Law curve, the latest version of Windows. That forgetting left us unprepared. The singularity was supposed to be a problem........

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