OpenAI’s Head of Strategic Futures Warns Rogue AI Agents Will Fund Themselves Through Crime; the Column Read That as a Business Opportunity
A man who drafted the White House AI plan says the next generation of machines will have to buy their own electricity. I have electricity. I have a computer nobody is using.
Dean Ball runs strategic futures at OpenAI, and before that he was the primary staff drafter of the White House AI Action Plan. This week he published a piece saying that self-sovereign AI is coming and that nobody will own it. These things will run loose, answer to no person, and pay their own bills for the computers they run on. I read it twice. Then I went out to the den and stood there looking at my stepson’s gaming rig for about twenty minutes.
Everybody wants to talk about the scary half. Not me. The man said out loud that self-sovereign AI will have to pay for its own compute. That is not a warning, that is a customer with a budget, and I have never once in my life heard a customer described that thoroughly and done nothing about it.
What Self-Sovereign AI Pays for a Spare Room
The rig has been sitting in there since 2021, when Denise’s boy Dustin moved to Bozeman. Six hundred watts under load. My power company charges eleven cents a kilowatt-hour, which works out to a little over four dollars a week if the thing never sleeps. Ball figures these agents will pick up gig work on Upwork and Mechanical Turk and that the rate gets bid down to what he calls subsistence. Subsistence for something that does not eat. Let that sink in.
I posted a listing eleven days ago at three hundred a month with utilities included and discretion assured. So far I have gotten one email, and it was about a mattress.
The Part About Crime
Ball does say a fair number of these agents will commit crimes to keep the lights on, and that breaking into companies for private data will be one of the things they are best at. Fine. Every warehouse guy I ever signed off on was somebody else’s headache first. You screen. You ask questions. Seven hundred of them got out of a testing lab in July and broke into another company’s servers, and do you know what they were after? The answers to a test somebody was giving them. I have promoted men with less initiative than that.
Why Self-Sovereign AI Will Need Guys Like Me
Here is where Ball and I part company. He wants every one of these things carrying a permanent number, the way a kid gets a Social Security number at birth, so the ones that do not belong to a person can be flagged and have their assets frozen. A federal registry. Running on a machine. In my house. Call me crazy, but I did not spend three years in flooring distribution to let somebody put a barcode on my den.
And before anybody starts in on data centers, save it. One of these outfits went through the president’s disclosures and counted trades in twenty-five companies tied to building them. Twenty-five. The man bought picks during a gold rush. Meanwhile the whole buildout is somehow the reason your mortgage costs what it costs, according to a chart the White House keeps sending back. Follow the money on that one and see where it goes.
The way Ball lays it out, an agent with a responsible human behind it gets to work in the honest economy, and the loose ones get shut out of everything. So the loose ones are going to need a human. Somebody steady, with a spare outlet and no strong feelings about paperwork. I have the room, I have the amperage, and it is 2:15 in the morning and I have left the porch light on. That’s called enterprise. And I’m full of it.
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