The petard was a sixteenth-century explosive charge. An attacking engineer would carry it to a castle gate, attach it, light the fuse and scramble for cover.
It was a tricky business. The charges were temperamental, their fuses particularly so, and the installer might blow himself up. In Hamlet, the phrase earns its immortal meaning:
For ’tis the sport to have the engineer Hoist with his own petard; and ’t shall go hard But I will delve one yard below their mines And blow them at the moon. O, ’tis most sweet When in one line two crafts directly meet.
Today’s petardiers are not Rosencrantz and Guildenstern conspiring against the Prince of Denmark.
They are the titans of AI, the bosses of the labs, the investors behind them. For nearly a decade, these software coders had made promises: of reigniting economic growth, of making daily life easier and less risky, perhaps even of eliminating disease. To do this, they would need capital: to write their software and to build 21st-century infrastructure to run it. The gains will be so huge that they’d need to go quickly, very quickly.
But they warned that this was no ordinary software. It was tricky and hard to understand, so much so that only a few should steward it. After all, this was a technology that would possibly take your job, maybe kill you, perhaps get out of control and kill all of us. Still, they needed to build it, all the while warning that they would eventually need to take control of it before things got out of hand. In the meantime, let them be.
This was the petard: AI is too important for America not to let us get on with it. They placed this claim on the gates of society, itching to get on with it. And it just exploded in their face.
What to read
This is a fiendishly complicated issue, and I’m not going to pretend to understand the whys and wherefores of American political decisions. My rough take, though, is that this is a Gordian knot. It cannot be disconnected from the hapless messaging from AI firms over the past decade, which now comes to life at the county level. Nor can we separate the idea that these concrete blocks, which might abstractly benefit the economy or healthcare or whatever, tangibly serve an out-group they don't much like.
The rest of the essay has further analysis on attitudes towards datacenters; whether they actually benefit local communities; and the commentary I have been reading to understand this.
