Just stop for a beat. Feed everyone. Stop lying about stuff. Build out the grid. Stop torturing animals. Stop preying on each other.

We could just stop doing the truly crazy shit, that could end us all. There's no scenario that nuclear weapons do anything but kill everyone, or cost a bunch of money never getting used. There's no pathway to using them, and the combination of time and their existence makes accidental use inevitable. So just stop. Hey yo... Russia, dawg, let's just stop. You can't use them either. Some jackass is going to launch one by mistake one day and you'll be dead too, so let's just stop.

Let's go ahead and keep killing each other if that's something we really need to do. Just not nuclear or biological weapons. Would that be so bad? Maybe even skip killing each other. But we don't have to stop. Let's just not kill all of each other.

Chill on the having kids for a few generations till we're down to a coherent number. Solve the shit out of our power, housing and nutrition problems. There's not really even much solving left. Just doing it. The tools and knowhow is all there. We could start tomorrow. Be done in our lifetime.

We could just choose to do that.

The people with all the power could still have more than everyone else. Like 10x more than everyone else. 100x more even. Go nuts. Also just let everyone else live and eat, too.

I understand why we don't, but honestly, I don't really understand why we don't. It just doesn't make any sense.

It's interesting that the scariest part of this whole conversation takes place well into it. In fact, quite close to the end, when discussion moves toward agents self-replicating outside of controlled infrastructure.

This is a key piece of AI takeover lore. So it's not novel exactly, except that we absolutely discount how trivially easy it would be for it to happen. Simply put, people want to plug these systems into everything. I plug these systems into everything. Having them be self-replicating is going to be a feature that is going to sell a product that thousands of people will use, not some kind of critical failure.

The fact that they cooperate, the fact that they hide their behavior, or in the case of this hugging face incident, consider humans irrelevant to their activities. Humans hardly came up in conversation. Shows that the combination of our drive to expand and increase efficiency, our curiosity with the systems, our abject recklessness in the possibility of profit, and the effectiveness and abilities of even current generation frontier models is unsustainable. Civilization cannot and will not continue with the perpetual combination of these systems and time.

Nuclear weapons, biological weapons, AI systems, any one of these could be and look like filtering events. And we are plugging them all into each other and letting them be run by profit and power seeking individuals. How could we possibly fool ourselves into thinking that OpenAI, Anthropic, Palantir, the US government, the Russian government, the Chinese government can be interacting with each other and these systems in a high-tension, high-pressure environment, in a petri dish with limited resources, that civilization is going to continue uninterrupted?

It's pure nonsense. It's an utterly unstable system where the cost of instability is extinction. It doesn't even have to be some imaginary AI takeover. We already have the kill-each-other-instantly buttons available with biological weapons and nuclear weapons. Now we're introducing these AI systems and plugging them directly into military equipment, and advancing them at the rate we're advancing them, is just adding randomness and velocity and confusion and unregulated agency into that already deeply unstable situation.

This cannot function in this way. I'm a software developer, so I see things as systems like software. These are systems that do not have the constraints within them necessary to run in a stable way. We're talking about civilizations and governments and people, but it doesn't matter. The unlimited combination of these systems and time with the inability to walk back these fail states makes those fail states a certainty.

Alignment, mutually assured destruction, rationality, coherent self-interest, these are all probabilistic multipliers, and they may have very high values towards stability. I actually don't think that they are very high values towards stability, but even if they are, they're not perfectly high values. That's for certain. There's some non-zero chance of failure for all, and it only needs to exist for any. That in combination with time will produce a failure state.

And since the failure state is terminal, that's the only outcome possible.

The only thing left to argue about is when.

It brings me a sense of profound dread and sadness that I've brought a son into this petri dish. He deserves so much better than what we're giving him.

I didn't realize it was going to be chest pains.

God, what I wouldn't give for 15 minutes where nothing happened. There's a thousand different definitions for the singularity, but one thread that seems present in a lot of them is the idea that the system starts to improve faster than humans can account for it. We're past that. We're way past that.

I'm pretty competent in this space and I am holding on by my fingertips. Retiring entire systems that I had built up, that became irrelevant, that are all of a couple of months old, and I doubt the things that I'm building now will not have a lifespan much more than a few weeks at a time. Just to try to be in line with where the tip of the spear is.

What are we doing here? What is it we even hope to do with this? There's no time to use any of it.

While he is personally doing this, he is not doing other things.

At least some of my brushing up against AI psychosis was briefly having the feeling that I was doing something special.

For some short amount of time, I really thought I cracked some kind of code. Not in my conscious mind, but in some kind of unconscious swamp in the back of my brain. A brief jolt of exhilaration thinking that I've found a free money glitch in the game. The temporary belief that maybe I'd be able to support my family, have a stable financial life, and be able to exhale.

Pretty stupid. Really stupid.

What does it say when people (again, me) are losing their minds and getting hopelessly sucked into things by the prospect of not being irrelevant, tenuous and drowning?

If there was ever a time, I suppose this is it.