On a recent doomscroll, I collided with a clip that sent my brain into orbit. In it, Uncle Sam (government name: Altman), the C.E.O. of OpenAI, delivers a rousing speech for the ages. “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.” The thought is harrowing—not because it states the obvious: that technocrats are locked in a race to own your precious gray matter. That’s right, the human brain, our most valuable asset, is about to hit the market, I.P.O.-style. That’s the plan, anyway. And the worst part is that his mission statement is neither far-fetched nor dystopian: the train has already left the station. Altman is describing a mutation of mankind well underway. Meanwhile, we—obedient netizens of the world—are sleepwalking straight into his trap.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the spaces where intelligence is performed. “All my mania for culture, for ‘really good’ things, for knowing about jazz recordings and red wine and Danish furniture, even about Keats and Shakespeare and James Baldwin, what if it’s all a form of vanity, or even worse, a little bandage over the initial wound of my origins?,” Sally Rooney wrote in her 2021 novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You?The sentiment stayed with me because it captures a certain strain of millennial anxiety: the idea that taste is not a journey but a virtue. It is no longer a personal endeavor, the stuff you love (or don’t), but another thing to optimize, a tool to stand out in the attention economy.
