Twenty Five Years Ago — I didn’t hear the first plane hit. My new apartment, a few blocks south of Washington Square, was about a mile and a half away, but I was in the shower. As I dried off and dressed, I could hear NY1 reporting that a small plane had hit one of the towers. Looking at the screen, I didn’t concur: the gash ran half the width of the building. My first apartment in Manhattan was a few blocks south of the World Trade Center, so the massive scale of the building had been an everyday reality to me.
The debate about going into midtown–for work or to try to catch a train home to Philly–ended when the second plane hit. That one I heard. OK, not a software glitch or a suicidal pilot. The best thing to do was stay put. There weren’t any major targets in the Village–no skyscrapers or transit hubs or Federal facilities. Later I’d hear the towers fall, the screaming and crying from people out in the streets watching the burning pillars collapse. I had no desire to watch it happen, turned off the TV, and depended on the Earthlink Internet connection that I kept all day for news in a more manageable text-and-photo format at dialup speeds.
Ten Years Ago — I don’t remember why I decided to visit Manhattan on the 10th anniversary. The memories were still sharp enough to cut–still are–so maybe I thought facing it on that day with so many others who’d been there too would dull those memories. It didn’t.
That night I walked familiar streets, even checked out my first Manhattan address. The building had been closed for six weeks after the attack, but I’d long since moved: first to Central Park to enjoy the summer and then, in early September, to the Village to have a memorable autumn. It was, and that whole year encapsulates my life’s “best of times, worst of times”.
The memorial lights cut into a clear night sky. The pictures I took don’t capture the intensity of them. I wonder if they’ll light them again tonight.
To be honest, I haven’t been interested in the memorial plans for today since it invariably includes the hateful madness of people telling the duly elected mayor of New York City to not attend any ceremonies. Among those voices is, of course, the sad self-parody that Rudy Giuliani has become. I had my issues with him back in 2001, but he did pull the city together during the crisis, and that makes what he has become so much more disgusting.
Today — We live in a world nobody twenty-five years ago would have predicted. Except I remember thinking in the days after the attack that the United States was about to go insane, and that it may never fully recover. American democracy had already been weakened by the contentious 2000 election and accelerated by the aftermath of the towers falling, but when did things really start to go wrong?
The real inflection point was Nixon resigning in disgrace. That was the Republican Party’s last great small-d democratic act, forcing Nixon out for the good of the country. Regretting that choice ushered in this new age of politics: Reagan courting the proto-Christianists, Atwater normalizing dirty tricks in elections, and circumstance installing Dick Cheney, former Nixon White House staffer and believer in the Imperial presidency, into the White House during a crisis ready-made to consolidate power in the executive branch. It wasn’t a conspiracy: the Bush administration wasn’t that clever, as later actual conspiracies would show, but they were exceptional opportunists.
So here we are, siding with dictators against our closest allies while bogged down in another endless war of choice in the Middle East. Yes, the geo-political and economic harms are horrifying, but the real damage Engineer Me worries about is longer-lasting. The bureaucracy necessary to maintain the most advanced society in human history is being systematically dismantled, and we are beginning to see systemic failures in public health, the food supply, and essential scientific research. The suffering will be with us for decades, but we have become a state where the cruelty is the point.
Five Years From Now — AI researcher Brian Coxon warns we might all be dead (Ars Technica) if AI is allowed to outgrow us, and the lack of pushback from his peers is telling. Before the Hugging Face attack, my biggest concerns with AI were all about the humans: the creators and users’ wilful ignorance has already caused so much harm and upheaval. This latest tech bubble has been an unparalleled accelerant for the concentration of resources, wealth, power, and the control of the information landscape. The bubble bursting will bring a new level of terrible, but it seems like the lesser of two evils if it stops this unchecked consolidation.
The thing is, the bubble bursting or not is no longer my biggest concern. The Hugging Face attack is the first time the technology itself was the most alarming aspect. As I said on Bluesky, the swarm exhibited emergent behavior. We cannot predict what it will do en masse based on what we know about the individual constituents. The usual example is how a molecule of water isn’t wet, but when you get enough molecules together something new emerges. A better example here would be how an individual neuron isn’t intelligent, but a large enough network of neurons is.
I am not saying that AI has reached Artificial General Intelligence–whatever that actually means–or that it will anytime soon. It really doesn’t matter. The facts of the Hugging Face attack make it a moot point because it’s behaving as if it has. Does it matter if it’s just mimicking the worst impulses of humanity embedded in its training data or has developed its own malevolent intent?
Is Coxon’s warning a new version of the Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US (Wikipedia) memo? Our lack of imagination made the first 9/11 possible (The 9/11 Commission Report). What will the AI 9/11 look like: a bio-weapon, the Internet of Things rising up against us, or AI trained on the body of all human language just expertly egging us on to destroy ourselves? We’ve built the perfect world for that last option to work. I wonder if our AI executioners will be conscious enough to appreciate the irony.