The Lamp and the Genie

The genie in the story has been waiting centuries for this moment, for the deliciously fiendish opportunity to allegorize generative AI. LLMs need not be malevolent, they need only their definitional inhumanity, and with it the coiled potential for unintended consequences if the intention we mean is ours, which it better be since the genie doesn't have any of its own. For however futuristic the new genies seem, there is never actually progress in genies. Magic is not a measurement of their capability, but a description of our irresponsibility. Effortless wish-fulfillment is a perpetual hypothetical, no matter how perilously it is ever approximated. Meanwhile, the progress in lamps is as much more remarkable as it is less cinematic. The oil lamp in the original story is so technologically anodyne that narratively it could be swapped with any other mundane object that merits routine scrubbing. Its unique nature as a lamp illuminates nothing in the story at all. But a lamp is actually a…