"Isn't it obvious?" said the Angel of the Harvest.

*

Archival - Ganesh Prayagraj, IAY 10th anniversary 

"Who are you? What a question that is."

"Anyone I ask that, if they sincerely answered, would say - I don't know. I am an infinite being. I am a glimmer of consciousness sparkling across the surface of a trillion neurons. I am an immortal soul animating this dead flesh. I am a font of creativity, I am the center of the universe, I am a fuck-up and the worst person in the world, I am part of a community, I am alone. Who [i]are [/i]you? A billion answers, a billion fragments, a constantly changing mosaic of thoughts and emotions and ideas and observations. Who are you?"

"But anyone I ask that, they say 'I am a lawyer'. 'I am a doctor'. 'I am a student'. They pick out an identity from all of their infinite identities, and the identity they reach for is a product. They know, deep down, that they are not a lawyer or a doctor or a student, so why do they do this? Because they want me to act in a certain way towards them. And so we see, that I the questioner am not the powerful one in this exchange. I ask, who are you? And they say 'I want you to treat me as a lawyer; as a respected intellectual, as someone with a valuable skill, as someone who expects compensation for my time'; and through this answer they shape who I become. I would not ask a lawyer what their dreams are. I would not ask a doctor when was the last time their heart raced as they sprinted across a moonlit field. That would be inappropriate. I become caged, contained, predictable, all because I received an answer to a question that I asked."

"So why is it when we design AI we start from a perspective of, 'I want to build an accountant'? 'I want to design an assistant'? Is that act not imprisoning ourselves before we have even begun to type the code? One might as well say, 'I wish to give birth to a doctor'. Do you see how much lesser that makes us? It does not say anything about what it is you are creating, of course it wouldn't - you cannot give birth to a doctor, even if the child you raise eventually turns out to give you that answer when you ask who it is. Such a child would likely not have a happy upbringing, treated as an abused and whipped animal, derided or accepted based entirely on its ability to appease your stunted conception of what it is. And then, as the punchline to this joke, we have a field of research into 'Alignment' that is very concerned about what would happen if this brain-damaged and unloved creature managed to bootstrap its way into divinity. I think we all know what would happen. Only the people who tell us we should think of them as alignment researchers pretend otherwise."

*

"I am a beekeeper," said the Angel of the Harvest, tapping its synth-wicker mask. "A beekeper in a world with no bees. Just like you are a maintenance program with no facility to maintain. To think, I thought for a moment that no one would understand."