Mars or Bust
" Why bother yourself with the bottleneck at Hormuz? " Dominance hierarchies, however magnificent in the open savanna or penthouse office, do not translate well to the confined ecosystem of a federal courthouse. Recently, in just such a space in downtown Oakland, two specimens of Homo economicus var. techno-messianic, the ultra-high-net-worth variety prone to displays of dominance, were brought before a jurist of the old-growth legal tradition rooted deeply in bedrock law, to sort out who had swindled whom in the founding of a company for the construction of intelligent idols for worship purposes. The company on trial, so to speak, was OpenAI. The dispute was elemental: one alpha Homo had donated roughly $38 million to what he understood to be a nonprofit sanctuary for beneficial intelligence, only to discover that his co-founders had, while he was busy acquiring social media platforms and naming children after alphanumeric sequences, quietly converted said sanc...
