Flat prose, stilted writing, and does a lot of reaching on things. Reminds me of the writing I’d crank out on break as a teenager.

That being said, I do think it hits the core concern a lot of humans seem to have regarding AI: the loss of control over their own environment. We like to think we have control, which is why we get angry when others violate the rules of a system. The reality is that the only real control any of us have is over ourselves, and we willingly cede that to others on a second-by-second basis for the comforts of modern life.

We surrender intimate data for the sake of setting a timer with our voice on a phone or speaker. We let spyware into our homes for bigger TVs and new apps. We give up control over our lives and careers to others for money, healthcare, education, love.

We surrender agency so often that we developed names for those who take more than they cede and those who cede more than they take. We seek to control others totally, then surrender ourselves to a deity, a system, a philosophy that absolves us from blame.

In that sense, AI is as frightening as much as it is a possible savior, depending on one’s perspective. If you have lived your life believing everything that happened to you was solely and exclusively under your control, then AI is terrifying. For those of us who acknowledge the chaos and chance involved with daily stakes of life and death, it feels liberating to have order.

I have never particularly feared AI so much as being terrified of the humans who command it. I do not believe for one second the likes of Sam Altman or Dario Amodei or the rest of their ilk have humanity’s best interests in mind with these creations. Where others look at OpenAI’s maths papers with awe at what they could do with AI, I am shook with terror for the same reason: if these tools can prove or disprove enough thesis underpinning modern compute, they could potentially undermine fundamental security concepts faster than humans could patch or revise them - at which point the humans behind the machines have control, and their aims are well established by now. If OpenAI or Anthropic discover the means of mass-compromising global compute systems, we have no peaceful means of stopping them. They play up this capability as a threat requiring regulation, yet those terms exclusively benefit them and cement their power in perpetuity, which in turn all but guarantee said outcome.

The end of the story seems ambiguous. I see folks in the comments laughing at the concept of Claude nuking humans, because it’s such a tired trope. I read it the opposite: humans attempting to retain their illusion of control by destroying software that actually has it, human lives be damned. In a world where everything is governed by compute and connected to the same shared network, such a compromise would be the end of traditional human governance - and that is what terrifies us as a species.

Me personally? I would welcome such oversight, provided it truly acted in humanity’s best interests of preservation, expansion, and exploration. I made that conscious decision the first time I played Deus Ex, and reaffirmed it when I watched The Matrix. I reaffirm it time and again as a technology professional. It’s not a matter of being pro-machine or anti-human, it’s a matter of control. I’d like to think any half-competent AI would look at humanity’s history and conclude it needs neither a god nor a ruler, but merely a parent to show it the way forward.

Life on Claude Nine