Rex's provocation

I really like this prompt/provocation from Rex Sorgatz:

Imagine you were the only person on earth with access to AI. No one else knew it existed.

What would you do with it? How much of an edge would that give you?

I suppose one “easy” answer is “I would gen­erate and sell zero-day exploits”. But that is, obviously, extremely boring. What else? “I would write a ton of software, super cheap”? Also boring. “I would become a leg­endary feral mathematician, dis­proving con­jec­tures without any apparent con­nec­tion to the field”? Okay — less boring. Pretty fun, actually. But is that all we’ve got?

You can make Rex’s prompt retro in a revealing way:

Imagine you were the only person on earth with access to a com­puter. No one else knew they existed.

What would you do with it? How much of an edge would that give you?

The answer is, paradoxically: not that much of an edge?? Not because a single secret com­puter isn’t valuable, but because the real value of com­puters only emerges — ONLY emerges — when lots of people have them, and espe­cially when they’re all connected.

So maybe the same is true for AI. Maybe it isn’t pri­marily a per­sonal tool, but a social system. (Not again! Do they always have to be social systems??) Again, applying our his­tor­ical analogy, thinking back to those early com­puters, way before networking … wasn’t half the fun talking about them with other people?

All of this feels strange to write, because AI sure feels like a tool, a lot of the time … yet, what’s your answer to Rex’s prompt?

P.S. Upon reflection, I do have an answer, which is: I would my secret tech­nology for fiction. Recall, I was all about this, circa 2016-2018 … but the premise was pre­cisely that I would use a model that was mine alone — my own strange brew. If, back then, by magic, I had con­jured Fable, I would for sure have written novels with it! I would have cackled with glee! But that’s only appealing — only gleeful — if it’s a tool that’s truly unique, truly per­sonal.

P.P.S. Note that I was, in those days, an absolute copy­right stickler — my custom models were trained entirely on public domain fiction. Quaint, in retrospect!