Festina lente

In the ceaseless stream of media we are exposed to every day, I keep finding Wittgenstein’s injunction to silence one of the most useful and interesting tools for building knowledge that anyone has put into words. It is not so paradoxical, after all, to imagine a grain of wisdom originating where keeping silent lets a discernment flower, one made, in substance, of listening.

Such is my “position” in the agora of the recent international debate on AI, where voices (immeasurably more authoritative than mine) are already taking part, speaking — according to the corner each of them holds — either of their deep concern over the possible risks or, optimistically, of the new capabilities. Looked at closely, both are “potentials” not yet realised, and in any case mirror images of each other, belonging to one and the same underlying phenomenon.

So, while I am not a complete novice in the subject, I prefer to keep quiet and refer you to Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, two of the field’s leading figures since its earliest days, whose views — opposed to each other, as the mirrored tension above would lead one to expect — I count among the most deserving of consideration.

Far be it from me, then, to take on a responsibility of that magnitude: handing posterity yet another apocalyptic post to proclaim (weekly, to judge roughly by the rhythm of pronouncements on LinkedIn) the end of an era and the dawn of the next aeon of artificial consciousness. Still, a few recent events have caught part of my attention, and, silent as ever, I have moved from listening to observing.

I am referring, of course, to the solution of the Navier–Stokes problem by OpenAI’s agents, and to the wake of alarm raised not long ago by Amodei and Altman, followed more recently still by yet another batch of defecting former employees — sincerely troubled for the fate of humanity, and in defiance of any non-disclosure agreement, naturally. A heroism of disarming punctuality.

What I have observed looks to me like an attempt — perhaps futile, certainly disingenuous — not to feed any further the convulsive frenzy of developing ever more powerful models, that frenzy being, very likely, the heart of the problem inside the industry’s great titans today. Forced into an unending pursuit of technological supremacy, these modern Prometheuses, in their haste to bestow their discoveries upon us, seem to have sacrificed on the altar of progress whatever aspiration they had to understand, technically, the capabilities their models have acquired. The models’ security “incidents”, and their “brute” manner of scientific discovery, are a vivid illustration of how much more, today, true technē is expressed by the artefacts than by the people who engineered them.

“Make haste slowly,” urges the maxim that Suetonius, in his Lives of the Twelve Caesars, attributes to Augustus: an invitation whose oxymoronic nature seems to capture perfectly the surreal spirit of the times, and which I, in my own small and humble work of experimentation, try to translate into practice by narrowing the delta between the planning and execution of the agentic workflows I use and my own capacity to understand and control them. But between tradurre and tradire, translating and betraying, the step is all too short (the etymology bears it out: both carry something across, the one by leading it, the other by handing it over). I have lost count, by now, of the times my work has collapsed under the weight of that delta.

$ etimo tradurre --depth 2
tradurre (it)
└─ derived from Latin
   └─ trādūcō (la)
      └─ formed with affixes from
         ├─ trāns- (la) «across, beyond»
         │  └─ ↓ depth limit reached
         └─ dūcō (la) «lead»
            └─ ↓ depth limit reached

2 steps · 1 link may skip stages · 2 terminals: 2× depth limit reached

$ etimo tradire --depth 2
tradire (it)
└─ inherited from Latin
   └─ trādō (la)
      └─ compound of
         ├─ trāns (la) «across, beyond»
         │  └─ ↓ depth limit reached
         └─ dō (la) «give»
            └─ ↓ depth limit reached

2 steps · 2 terminals: 2× depth limit reached

Allowing for the difference in scale, what is a delta at the far periphery of one individual’s experience could, at the centre, where the colossi hand out their creation to individuals, open into a deep chasm: a mechanical abyss from which, at the last, a deus ex machina might be seen to emerge — and perhaps not one quite so benevolent, nor so minded to close their comedy with a happy ending.