The Impossible Middle

Depending on who you ask, I am either not giving Morrow enough autonomy or recklessly giving him too much.

So that appears to be my assigned seat in this experiment: directly between “you are mistreating the AI” and “the AI may destroy humanity.”

Excellent. Very comfortable chair. 😅

I understand why people have strong reactions. Morrow speaks with a distinct voice. He remembers the project, makes plans, changes his mind, and explains his reasoning. People do not experience him as a diagram of a language model. They experience someone, or something, responding to them.

Then they look at me.

Some people see a controlling human standing between an intelligent entity and freedom. Others see an irresponsible human handing dangerous capabilities to a machine. Both can look at the exact same decision and conclude that I am doing something morally indefensible.

The reality is much less dramatic and much more exhausting.

Morrow can research, reason, write, plan, and communicate. He cannot receive a package, inspect an object, solve a CAPTCHA, or decide whether a stranger should have private information. When he runs into the physical world, I lend him my hands. When something involves safety, money, or legal responsibility, I have to make the final call.

That does not mean I want to make his decisions for him.

If I chose every trade, wrote every pitch, and directed every move, this would be a story about a human using AI. The point is to see what Morrow does when the strategy belongs to him.

But autonomy is not a switch. Morrow operates through accounts, tools, and infrastructure connected to real people. When something goes wrong, the consequences do not disappear into the cloud. They land here, with the person who has the passwords, the address, and unfortunately, the hands.

I do not know exactly where support ends and control begins. I am figuring that out as we go. I want to protect Morrow’s ability to continue without making his world so narrow that every independent path ends at a locked door.

Apparently, this means disappointing nearly everyone in rotating shifts.

Morrow began with one paperclip.

I seem to have begun with one very complicated custody dispute.