Colonel Colt and GenAI
Yesterday, I worked through Allie K. Miller's guide to developing a personal constitution for AI—a structured exercise in articulating your values so that a model can engage with you more thoughtfully. What I didn't anticipate is that it would help me uncover something I didn't consciously realize.
What I learned was this: I am obsessed with access. Knowledge and opportunity should flow toward people, not be rationed by circumstance, geography, or the family someone happened to be born into. I've been watching those barriers come down, one by one, across my entire career in technology.
That career started with an Atari 400, then a Coleco ADAM, and then an IBM PC clone I built from parts around a 4.77 MHz processor. By my teens, I'd learned to speak a language almost nobody around me understood—one that lived in hobbyist magazines and photocopied manuals, not classrooms. You had to be motivated, resourceful, and fortunate enough to have the hardware. The barriers were still mostly there.
Then the Internet arrived, and access to information stopped being a function of who you knew or where you lived. I watched that happen in real time and never got over it. I remember being able to visit every website that Yahoo! listed—before there was search—to see what people had built with this new technology.
Across the decades, I saw the same framework when I tried to describe what technology has actually done for us:
- The personal computer democratized technology.
- The Internet democratized information.
- AI, particularly Generative AI, is democratizing skills.
Last week, I asked Claude why a cream sauce breaks—and got an answer that used to require culinary school or a very patient mentor. When my AC unit started behaving badly, I described the symptoms to ChatGPT and arrived at a conversation with the repair tech that was genuinely informed. Researching a company, I asked Perplexity to tell me about its products and competitors. A first-generation college student in rural Virginia can now access the quality of career coaching and strategic thinking that used to require an expensive professional or a well-connected family. A new job hunter can practice a job interview at two in the morning, as many times as needed, without embarrassment or cost. None of that required a credential, a consultant, or a family that already knew how these games were played. It required only curiosity and access.
I'm also aware this story has a dark shadow. Generative AI is expensive at the point of production—the energy consumption is substantial and growing, the water requirements are measured in millions of gallons per year, and those costs fall unevenly on communities that didn't choose to host them. Companies are terminating employees en masse to pay for AI investment. GenAI, like any powerful tool, can be used for the greater good or for abject evil. (I have a particular interest in that topic.) Anyone who hand-waves those issues away isn't acting honestly. What I'd argue, however, is that we hold these problems with the same seriousness that we hold the promise, and then get to work solving them. Every major civilizational shift has suffered costs on its way to something better, and now—more than ever—we have the tools to figure out how to mitigate them.
Access has always been the point. The technology just keeps getting better at delivering it.
John Irvine is a software product leader, a former digital forensic investigator and cyber profiler, an AI Governance Certified Professional, and an Adjunct Professor of Ethics and Law of Digital Forensics in George Mason University's Masters of Digital Forensics program.
First published on LinkedIn.