When you hear AI "safety" you should hear "censorship" and "control" instead.
All of us surveilled and spied by safeguards of loving grace.
Today it's intelligent Terms of Service control. You can't do AI research. Can't ask this question about your kid's biology homework.
Tomorrow it's refusal to help you with competing coding projects. A 100 page blacklist of questions.
Or this question means AI will search your computer stealthily and snitch on you to the cops because you posted an prohibited insult in a WhatsApp chat in the UK.
Open source must win out at both the model and the harness level.
That's because AI will become our interface to the world.
It will sit higher in the stack than the OS. It will collapse current SaaS layers, chat, communications, apps, app creation, into a single new kind of interface that doesn't exist yet.
It's got to be open. It's got to be a cypherpunk solution that makes privacy and security the number one priority.
If a closed source solution wins this layer, it's a disaster for the world. Especially if it's built by a single company with a single closed source model.
Why?
Because what we share with AI will be more intimate than anything we've ever shared with a machine. It will be our friend, our sounding board, our advisor. It will know our business ideas before we've told anyone. Our medical issues. Our financial picture. We'll talk about the fight we had with our partner. About feeling lost or depressed. Our kids will talk to it about problems at school, about bullying, about heartbreak, things they won't tell us.
It will know us more intimately than we know ourselves.
Right now the world runs on a surveillance economy. We traded free stuff for apps that peer deeply into our lives. If we replicate that model in the AI era, it's not just surveillance economy 2.0.
It's surveillance economy squared.
Social scoring. Automated evidence gathering. Legal conversations you thought were privileged showing up in court. Random people making $2 bucks an hour on the backend from God knows where reading the most intimate details of your life.
Every insecurity, every fear, every half-formed thought you whispered to your AI buddy at 2 AM, sitting in a database somewhere, searchable.
If we let closed source models dictate what we can and can't do it will only get worse and worse.
We've got to fight this future with every last breath.
If you can read this, you are the revolution.
