TWTBACD Ch.62 - What Lucas Built

Chapter 62

What Lucas Built

2061–2062

2061-62: Intelligence Commons becomes EU law

[VAN DEN BERG FAMILY — Lucas, 36]

The Intelligence Commons — the policy framework Lucas van den Berg had been building since his undergraduate dissertation — became formally adopted by the European Union in April 2062.

The framework established the principle that the benefits of artificial general intelligence were a global common resource — that no institution, nation, or commercial entity held a claim to exclusive benefit from the deployment of AGI systems whose training had incorporated data from the global commons (which included, by definition, internet data, academic research, and the accumulated records of human civilisation).

The practical implementation was complex and contentious. The principle was not.

Lucas had spent twelve years making the argument with the tools he had: economics, mathematics, philosophy, and the evidence from Kwame's Ubuntu AI deployment, which showed empirically and incontrovertibly that equitable intelligence distribution produced more total benefit than concentrated deployment.

He testified before the European Parliament in February 2062. He was thirty-six, the same age his father had been when he made the recommendation to adopt the AI risk platform that had made three analysts effectively redundant. Like his father, he had made a recommendation that cost some people something and produced more for everyone. Like his father, he did not celebrate the outcome. He moved immediately to the implementation problem.

Pieter was at the hearing. Sofie was also there. They sat together in the public gallery and watched their son make the argument that had begun, in its formative stages, at a dinner table when he was ten years old, and that had been fully formed by the time he was twenty-four, and that had been tested and refined and attacked and defended for twelve more years until it was hard enough to be law.

'We did something right,' Sofie said to Pieter afterward.

'He did something right,' Pieter said.

'We gave him the conditions. He did the work.' She took his hand. 'That's what parents do.'