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 com­puter in iso­la­tion 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 pow­erful tool, but a social system. (Not again! Why do they keep being social systems?!) This feels weird to write, because AI sure seems like a pow­erful tool … yet, what’s your answer to Rex’s prompt?