Control Your Propensity

The diner’s TV was mounted too high, the kind of angle that gives you a neck cramp just trying to read the captions. Muted news. Some courtroom in Oakland. A judge in robes — woman, middle-aged, the face of someone who’s seen too much bullshit and stopped pretending to be surprised by it — was looking down at two men who between them could probably buy most of the state.

“Control your propensity to use social media,” she said. Something like that. The caption cut out when the coffee machine hissed.

I laughed. The waitress asked what was funny and I said nothing, just the whole thing.

She didn’t ask what I meant. They never do anymore.

Here’s what you need to know about the future. Two guys who’ve made more money than God are standing in a courtroom getting told to behave. Not because they built something dangerous. Not because they broke something. Because they can’t stop posting.

Musk doesn’t trust Altman. Altman built the thing Musk wanted to be in charge of. Now they’re fighting like a divorce over who gets the house, except the house is a machine nobody fully understands and the neighborhood is everyone else on earth.

I’ve watched this long enough. I watched the internet go from a weird little hobby for guys in sandals to the thing that decides elections and ruins marriages. Somewhere between there and here, the geeks became billionaires and the billionaires became children. And the rest of us just learned to look away.

But a judge in Oakland made me look. She gave them the same speech you’d give two drunks outside a bar at last call. Control yourselves. Use your words like adults. Only she said it to men who will never hear “no” from anyone else again.

That’s the real story. Not the lawsuit. Not OpenAI’s corporate structure or who betrayed who when. The story is what money does to the human ear. You pay people enough and they stop hearing criticism. Eventually you pay yourself enough that you can’t even hear a federal judge without treating it like another post to respond to.

And here’s what gets me — the AI is watching this. Learning from it. Every petty tweet, every legal motion, every public insult between two guys who think they’re deciding humanity’s next chapter. The machine doesn’t know they’re billionaires. It just sees text. It learns from what we feed it, and right now we’re feeding it a steady diet of ego and spite.

I asked a guy at the bar last week if he was worried about AI. He said no, he’s worried about people. That’s the smartest thing I’ve heard in months. The machine isn’t the problem. The machine is a mirror. And if you don’t like what you see in a mirror, breaking the mirror doesn’t change your face.

The part nobody wants to talk about is that both of these men could be right about the dangers and still be the wrong people to solve them. Being right about a problem doesn’t make you qualified to fix it. I’ve been right about plenty of things. It never paid my rent.

I keep thinking about the waitress. She has a kid, I can tell by the crayon drawings on the fridge behind the counter. She works doubles. She’ll never meet either of these men, never use their products, never hold stock in their companies. But their feud will shape whether her kid has a job in ten years, or whether a computer grades his homework and flags his late rent as a “risk factor” and denies him a loan before he knows he needed one.

That’s the weight of this. Not the technology. The power. Two men fighting over who holds it while the rest of us try to pay rent. A judge telling them to moderate their “propensity.” I worked for the post office. I know what happens when management moderates its propensity. Nothing. Nothing happens, and then eventually something breaks, and by then it’s your back, not theirs.

There’s a phrase I hate: “The grown-ups are talking.” I heard it a lot in my life, usually from people who weren’t grown up at all. These days the grown-ups are in court being told to stop posting, and the machines are taking notes.

The coffee’s cold now. The TV’s moved on to traffic. And I’m sitting here wondering if the machine will do better than us because it’s not smart enough to want to win. It doesn’t need to be right. It doesn’t need the last word. It just processes.

Maybe that’s the part that should scare us. Or maybe that’s the part that should give us hope. I’m still figuring out which.

The bill comes to eight dollars. I leave twelve and walk out into light that doesn’t feel like morning or afternoon, just time passing. Somewhere in Oakland, two rich men are probably already back on their phones. The machine learns. Time passes. The waitress wipes the counter.

That’s the whole story. The rest is just noise.

Source: Are we losing our minds to AI?