How the World Got Wired · Two AI Internets

Coming Back to Grandma

I want to end the way I began.

Two hundred and some pages ago, in the prologue, I told you about your grandmother filming a sunset on a beach in Vietnam and uploading the video to Facebook, so that you, in your bedroom, on the other side of the world, could see it less than two seconds later.

I told you the video traveled, in pieces, through cables on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Through routers in a dozen countries. Through buildings the size of aircraft carriers full of humming computers. Through a system that has no boss, that is owned by nobody, that just works, because billions of machines all agree to follow a small set of common rules that two men sketched out, in a hotel room near the San Francisco airport, in 1973.

That system is the inheritance you have been handed. It was built by specific people, with specific names, working in specific places, with specific money. Government money, mostly, at the bottom. Private money, mostly, at the top. Idealism, mostly, at the bottom. Greed, mixed with idealism, at the top. The whole thing is a both-and. It has connected your grandmother to you and helped facilitate genocide. It has spread the world’s knowledge and broken much of the world’s attention. It has produced enormous wealth and enormous harm at the same time, from the same actions, in ways that are, even now, hard to entirely sort out.

The thing being built right now — the artificial intelligence revolution that this book ends with — is going to do something similar, except probably more so. It will be transformative in ways that are hard to predict. It will help. It will hurt. It will make some people much richer. It will make decisions, every day, that affect ordinary people who did not choose to have those decisions made by software.

Where it ends up depends, partly, on what your generation does about it.

I would not tell you that your job, as you grow up, is to fix all of this. That is too much to put on a young person. But I will tell you something else.

Your job, I think, is to see clearly. To notice the patterns I have spent this book describing. To know that the things adults tell you about technology are usually too simple in one direction or another. To know that public money has, almost always, paid for the foundations, and that private money has, almost always, captured the wealth. To know that smart, careful, patient people, often funded modestly, often working in places that the world later forgets, have built much of what matters most in your world. To know that the same person can be both an idealist and a realist, at different points in their life. To know that the people who build a thing are not always the people who own it. To know that the rules of the internet you experience, the apps you use, the AI that talks to you, are not laws of nature — they are choices, made by specific people, for specific reasons, that can be made differently.

If you can hold all of that in your mind, clearly, as you grow up, you will be able to think about technology — and about the world it is making — better than most people you meet.

That is what this book has tried to give you.

It is enough.

I started by telling you about a grandmother on a beach in Da Nang, filming a ten-second sunset for her family halfway around the world — a thing that would have been impossible in any other century.

That world ended a long time ago. The world you have now is enormous, instantaneous, beautiful, dangerous, and increasingly built on systems that are smarter, in narrow ways, than the people who designed them.

What you do with it is up to you.

I am glad to have walked through it with you, even just in this small way, on these pages.

[End of Chapter 22.]

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