One of the biggest myths about AI is people think of it as a tool and that tools are neutral and that it's up to us to decide how we're going to use it. And what that misses is that while yes, technology is a tool, while humans wield technology, incentives wield humans. And so it's not the right question to ask is AI good or bad, but rather what are the incentives that are going to dictate which way AI is used, which are good or bad. Today, I think a lot of people are concerned with how quickly times are moving, how quickly technology is accelerating, and it kind of feels like we're being stretched out, right? We have all of this attention, these resources, this capability and talent, and like a piece of taffy, it's just being stretched out.
And at some point, we expect it to break. We expect fragility to take hold. What we're really excited about is building more resilient infrastructure that can scale as we move faster with technology. We are actually in a historic moment where we are in precipice of AI really from my perspective reshaping how we interacted with computing. Right now the control is in the hands of a few companies and corporations and so user own AI is really about flipping that control and giving it back to the individual users and communities instead of having the centralization continue happening toward few corporations.
I would say first and foremost the altruism. Everybody here feels a sense of responsibility towards uh something much larger than themselves or their groups. And that's what humanity needs. We need to have this vision of the future generations, the human and non-human life on Earth. And and that's what they see here.
The Internet Archive is a temple to knowledge. It is the library of Alexandria for the digital age. Back when the worldwide web was just beginning, 1996ish, our founder, Brewster Kale, emerged from MIT and realized, wow, someday people might want to look back who those web pages belong to. It's not to us. We're not a corporation that's going to monetize it.
It belongs to a commons. It belongs to the people.
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