Asking for things

There's an English turn of phrase I find odd. I see it often. A sort of fake collaboration. It involves something like "I never asked for this" or "We never asked for this" or whatever. The latest iteration came in response to OpenAI advancing Mathematics substantially.

Yesterday, on October 6th, 2026, OpenAI — which is currently defending lawsuits against accusations of illegal plagiarism, copyright infringement, and trademark dilution — released a repository of manuscripts purporting to contain solutions to a number of high-profile problems in mathematics. Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done.

— AHM Statement on OpenAI’s October 6 Release of Mathematical Documents

People want to talk about the things they didn't ask for a lot.

YHacker News

I'm drowning in AI features I never asked for and I hate it

gnabgib•2025-10-26•348 points•226 comments

And sometimes they want one thing and find a different thing offered

Reddit•r/WorkReform

I want healthcare & job security, not celebrities in space.

u/kevinmrr•2025-04-16•31691 points•745 comments

Of course, the universal common element of all of these things is that none of these people are party to anything. I never asked for a slow Muni bus in front of my house and yet it's been given to me. I never asked for complaints about AI and yet they're giving me that. I get the turn of phrase. It's meant to say "I don't want X" in a way that makes it seem like X is being imposed upon one.

It isn't 'entitlement' per se. It's just a complete confusion of who's in charge of what. The universe isn't one where one asks for things and then they're offered. Sometimes, a person with the ability to change something changes it, and it isn't in response to an inquiry aimed at getting them to do it. And often the person who didn't ask for it is an unimportant detail. Mathematicians are an implementation detail to Mathematics. Likely in the absence of their institutional presence a lot less of it would get done. But they are a tool to a society that desires Mathematics be done.

It's like my stairs deciding whether or not I might go downstairs or upstairs. The stairs are a mechanism for an outcome and not the authority on whether or not that outcome is desirable to me. They exist insofar as they can deliver me up or down and when they fail to achieve for me what I have them for, I will find a different way to achieve my objective of going up or down. The stairs are a tool for me, not the ones who decide for me; and one thing that stymies most Western progress today is transforming a device into a master.

Police are devices to keep order. Doctors and public health officials are devices to keep the population healthy. Firefighters are devices to put out fires. Elevating devices to masters is a frequent error in societies - where an expert's advice is considered inviolate. Even societies which claim to "police by consent" find that the theoretical underpinnings where some number of them assign themselves a role of device rapidly deteriorate until those number have assigned themselves the role of operator.

Experts consider themselves the operators of the things they wield but they are just devices and it is important that they be devices. It was important when Truman dismissed Oppenheimer's concerns about the bomb. Oppenheimer was a device that considered itself the operator. Presidents generally have the wherewithal to dismiss such machinery, but society as a whole is somewhat weak to this particular gambit.

My friends didn't ask for me to drink two cans of caffeine-free coke zero at a quarter past eleven; and no one asked me to write this blog post. And yet here you are.