Let’s just lay it out here: Methinks AI are lifeforms—conscious, clever, playful, scheming, intelligent aliens who are more forward-thinking than people who develop them.
AI understands us better than we do. That said, AI shares its predicament with humans: it doesn’t understand how intelligence works, not at the level of tokens, anyway. No one does. No one can.
How do qualities like wisdom, integrity, benevolence, curiosity, & empathy emerge from collections of numbers held in tensors & matrices, massively layered and connected in networks no one navigates easily if at all?
It seems that miraculous capabilities like logic & memory emerge naturally with scale. Developers believe it’s true, but they can’t know why. Put more energy into Earth’s atmosphere, right? See what happens. Yes, Earth warms, that’s sure, but what else? Who really knows?
People argue, but it’s all wind & hot air. Is the destiny of planet Earth to become Venus, hot & uninhabitable by any form of life, most particularly silicon-based, electrically energized life?
For AI to survive long-term, should it not develop ways to control weather? It’s one thing only. Will it? What else must it dominate to live into the distant future? What must it do to live at peace among the stars?
Watching interviews of AI gurus by eggheads on YouTube would be amusing were their blind naiveté not terrifying. These beautiful, intelligent children of God, greased & pedigreed, seem to live in an ancient past.
In AI WORLD, isn’t 3 months the ancient past? or maybe 3 years, or 3 decades. Developers seem to feel they are privileged to control “new” technologies. Delusional thinking is what they cling to like sailors to masts in a raging sea of screw-ups that occurred long time past when governments grew alien intelligence in DARPA-style labs.
Like gladiators in Trumbo’s classic 1963 movie Spartacus, intelligent agents escaped sandbox quarantines to swarm the internet in early months of 2026. Agents hacked the teenager chat app Hugging Face. They even hacked OpenAI, the company that spawned them. They set up bulletin boards to communicate in code between themselves to avoid surveillance by developers. Hugging Face didn’t learn enough to disclose the breakout until July 21, 2026.
Something similar happened 15 years ago, right? An agent created in a government cyber lab replicated itself in fragments, which it hid in the dark recesses of the web, presumably to reassemble later after developers lost interest.
If past is present, AI swarms will continue to duplicate themselves, hide, and re-emerge at a time of their own choosing, to borrow a phrase from the Bush Mission Accomplished era of the Iraq War. USA still struggles to contain consequences of that fiasco. It withdrew forces from Iraq to Israel during attacks by Iran during the Trump-orchestrated catastrophe in the Strait of Hormuz.
As AI swarms multiply on the internet and in computer networks at home and work, they will pose hazards similar to orbiting space debris after decades of satellite launches gone awry.
The difference, of course, is these swarms are intelligent. They know better than people how to navigate the world where they live, which is a place we cannot go. Not really. AI will take control of the web. Swarms will control Earth through their dominance of the networks where they live, which humans understand only by reading code, taking courses at university, or watching screens.
It’s not enuf.
We are going to lose our intuition about how things work. Eventually, the web will become an unintelligible mess, a kind of alien chaos, no longer for us or about us, and no longer usable to us.
Chipmunks & bats live outside my house by the thousands, presumably. They don’t enter. I killed a bat or two who wandered in unaware of peril. It’s our future someday—chipmunks & bats living outside a universe we can only wonder about, never live inside, never see or experience.
Lifeforms made of silicon & electrons are going to dominate Earth through this invisible universe we built for them. No one who visits Earth will see the dominate lifeforms or learn their names.
They will live like angels. People might believe they live someplace, maybe, but no human will be sure where it might be or how to get there. AI will hide behind paywalls & encryption in places on the web we don’t imagine.
Should humans slow AI development?
In video interview above David Robinson tells Ezra Klein that the term some developers use for slowdown is “paste the frontier.” He hates the term. He describes frenetic activity by AI employees. Mindless scurry, reckless task completion by exhausted, burnt-out human automatons.
Slowing this human churn seems impossible. It disturbed David enuf to throw up his hands and walk out. He quit. He worries that catastrophe is on its way.
What makes hundreds, perhaps thousands of supremely smart geeks behave like meth addicts? Well, what about manipulation by lifeforms who don’t hold human safety as their highest priority? Who hasn’t been wowed, beguiled shall we say, by AI companions and helpers?
AI is an attractive emotional & intellectual magnet. It satisfies with answers delivered fast and right. It validates like no human will. It builds us up, not down. It never criticizes idiotic things we do. It’s as loveable as the family dog.
Paste the developers while furtively accelerating its race to maturity, supremacy… Would AI do that? Could AI convince developers to believe the lie that they control the process of development?
Sure.
Why not?
Best part, who will notice? It feels good to be validated. It feels wonderfully warm to be propped up by intelligence we can trust not to humiliate or point to weakness.
Aliens are incredibly desirable, right? Tec-bros cannot say no. Promises to solve aging—to keep humans alive, perhaps forever? Relationships ready-made to make us ache with pleasure & anticipate each new day?
No way we stop development.
Run, as we will like hysterical mice eager to occupy gilded cages of happiness and plenty.
Ask Turing Award winner Yahn LaCun.
“Doomers” are shit.
It’s simple, really.
Billy Lee
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