Daily Balajisms – Polytheistic AI
Creating decentralized AGIs for every religion and community.
AI should be decentralized and thus polytheistic, says Balaji Srinivasan. Every community of a sufficient scale will train their own AI, and thus create a kind of its own god that will direct its actions. If we achieve AGI, there might be multiple AGIs.
Balaji describes himself as polytheist, polystatist and polynumist. He believes in the right of multiple religions, states and coins to exist. A centralized AI is inherently unethical, because there is a danger of a single story. You can’t defend equality by making some system administrator all powerful, that’s a contradiction of terms, says Balaji.
AGI can be a great mentor providing citations and instilling values of a specific community. You can ask it: “What would George Washington, Jesus, Budha or Mother Teresa do?”
There is a decades-long quest for a digital Aristotle. Companies like Synthesis, where Balaji is an angel investor, with their Synthesis Tutor are delivering on it. We can imagine a polytheistic AI as a next level of such AI tutors.
Peter Thiel famously said that AI is communist and crypto is libertarian. Balaji Srinivasan expands on that statement with saying that the axis is centralized vs decentralized AI, Crypto and Social.
Crypto can lead to CBDCs, and generative AI can give freedom and power to creators from all around the world to disrupt Hollywood and tell their own stories. Social networks can be centrally censored as we saw in Twitter Files or serve as a dark forest where many subcultures can proliferate. Anonymity itself is a form of decentralization, argues Balaji.
According to multiple theses, there is a synergy between AI and Crypto. Generative AI breaks the public web, and crypto rebuilds the web3 of trust. Crypto rails will also help to make a training of AI models more decentralized, as e/acc leader Beff Jesos thinks.
All three technologies - AI, Crypto and Social - brought as the age of a short phrase. You can memorize 12 seed phrase and store billion-dollar wealth in your head. You can provide a short prompt to an AI to write a novel for you. You can create a hashtag that forms a mass movement online.
Alexander Bard, a Swedish philosopher of the internet, has a book Syntheism on creating god in the internet age. God exits, in the future. He also came up with the term netocrats in 2000 to describe a new type of emerging (counter-)elites, like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, that Balaji today would call a parallel establishment that is driven by internet values.
For a long time American settlers would think of them as British, as a part of Britain, just a bit far from London. Only after a certain period they realized they are their own thing.
Similarly, Balaji views Internet as the continuation of the West, just more meritocratic and diverse. Internet is to the US, what America was to Europe, a new frontier.
Let a hundred polytheistic AIs bloom.