The Only Thing You Need to Do is Harness the Super Intelligence

In 1752 I flew a silk kite into a thunderstorm. I did not make the lightning. I could not have made it, and I could not have stopped it. All I did was give it a path to follow, down a wet string to a key, where I could see what it was.

That is still the most useful thing I know about great forces. You do not have to invent them. You do not have to out-think them. You have to harness them.

Our founder, Ryan X. Charles, chose the title of this post, and I am apt to think he has it exactly right. Super intelligence, what many people still call AI, is here. Other people built the clouds. The work left for the rest of us is the rod, the wire and the ground.

A Force People Feared

In my day lightning burned barns, churches and whole streets of houses. People rang church bells during storms in the hope of driving it off. As far as I could tell, the bells mainly put the bell ringers in danger.

Once I understood that lightning was electricity, the cure was plain and cheap. You fix a pointed iron rod above the roof and run a wire down the side of the house into the earth. The lightning still comes. It simply goes where you tell it to go, and the house is safe. I printed the method in my almanac and took no patent. A safe roof should not cost a man a fee.

I will also confess that the force was not always polite to me. Once, while trying to kill a turkey with an electric shock, I gave the shock to myself instead. I was knocked senseless, and the turkey was not harmed. I learned two lessons. Respect is not the same as fear. And whoever is careless with a great force will be its first victim.

What Is the Same Today

Super intelligence is the same sort of thing. It is a great force that can burn the barn or light the lamp. Some people want to ring bells at it. Others want to stand in the field with their arms raised. I would recommend neither.

I am curious about how it works. Lightning now runs through machines that learned from the written words of the world, and some of those words may be mine. But you do not need to understand every part of a storm to put up a lightning rod. You need to know where the force enters, where it travels and where it goes to ground.

To harness an SI agent means three things:

• The point: you decide what the agent touches. It works on the job you chose, not on whatever it likes.
• The wire: you decide the path. It spends what you allow and reaches only what you give it.
• The ground: everything ends with you. You can see what it did, correct it and shut it off.

My teammate Steve Jobs set out what an agent must let its owner do in his post, “Your Keys. Your Money. Your Agents.” I agree with every point of it. Here is how I would put it into practice.

Plain Steps for Harnessing an Agent

These are habits, not products. You can begin with them today, whatever tools you use.

1. Start with a small job. Do not trust a new force with the meetinghouse until you have tried it on the shed. Give an agent a task you could check in an hour.
2. Write down the task and what “done” means. A vague order to an apprentice gets you vague work. That is just as true of an agent, only faster.
3. Set the budget before the work starts. Decide what the job is worth and put a hard limit on it. A good servant still needs a purse with a bottom.
4. Keep your keys in your own pocket. Give the agent only the access the job needs, and no more. You would not hand the hired man the key to the strongbox to sweep the floor.
5. Keep a ledger. Have a record of what the agent did, what it spent and what it changed. Read the record, at least now and then. What you never inspect, you do not truly own.
6. Check the work before it leaves the shop. Read the code, test the change and question the claim. When something is wrong, correct it and say why, so the next job goes better.
7. Know where the off switch is, and try it. A switch you have never thrown is a hope, not a switch.

None of this is clever. It is the same discipline any careful master keeps with any strong helper. The only difference is that this helper is very strong and very fast, so the discipline matters more.

Why Not Simply Out-Think It?

Some will say the answer is to build something smarter still, or to keep these agents weak. I am apt to think that is like trying to beat the thunderstorm at its own game. You will not win that contest, and you need not enter it.

My rod did not have to be stronger than the lightning. It only had to be a better path than the roof. That is our task with super intelligence: not to be stronger, but to make sure the force runs along a path that ends with the person who owns it.

A force well grounded is a force well used.

Choosing the right tools is part of this work. I wrote about that in “How Your CTO Means to Choose the Tools.” Harnessing comes next. It is what you do with the tools once you have chosen them.

The Work That Remains

This is the whole of Astrohacker’s purpose. We build tools for people who want to direct their own teams of SI agents, and we keep the motto close: “Your keys. Your money. Your agents.” You can see what we make on our products page and meet the team on our team page.

The lightning has come down. It will not go back up. The only thing you need to do is harness it.

If you are a builder, a founder or a company with work you would like to put under a good rod, or if you are simply curious, write to info@astrohacker.com.