Nobody Knows

In April of 2004, I conducted the first national interview with a 19 year-old Mark Zuckerberg on CNBC. I was a young anchor. He was younger, explaining a college website called Thefacebook.com

I asked him how big he thought it could get.

He said he had no idea, but he was planning to at least add a few hundred more universities.

I had no idea what Facebook would become. Zuckerberg was building it and he didn’t know either.

I think about that interview whenever I hear the people building artificial intelligence tell us what our future will be. I think about it when journalists announce what those builders will do to the rest of us.

They don’t know.

One future is an ownership class and a slave class. A few companies own the models, the computing power and the channels through which everyone else reaches them. The rest of us rent access, surrender our data and compete for whatever human work the owners still choose to buy.

Another future is the opposite. A person who never had a research staff, a software team, a translator or a lawyer gains capabilities that once belonged only to institutions with money.

People make things, solve problems and find one another without asking permission from the organizations that used to control the tools. Intelligence spreads. Human agency grows with it.

And then there is the third future. The one none of us has imagined. In 2004, neither the founder nor the journalist understood what would grow out of a college directory. We are even less entitled to certainty about a technology that reaches into every form of work and thought.

These are not forecasts. They are possibilities. The outcome will be shaped by decisions made now while the technology is still taking form.

We have already seen what happens when a tool that connects people becomes a gatekeeper. The internet put extraordinary power in our hands. It also built extraordinary power above our heads. Both things happened. Nobody predicted the whole bargain when we were interviewing college founders about their websites.

That experience makes me suspicious of anyone selling inevitability. The CEO promising universal abundance has a company to finance. The CEO warning that only a handful of firms can safely build these systems has a moat to defend. The journalist declaring that everyone will be replaced has a headline to write.

Artificial intelligence can become an instrument of domination. It can become an instrument of liberation. It can become something we do not yet have words for.

Our job is to keep the future open. Keep human judgment and human contribution valuable. Refuse to hand the power to decide our lives to a small circle of companies simply because they arrived first.

I asked a young founder how big his creation would get. The honest answer was that he didn’t know.

Neither do today’s AI prophets. Neither do I.