michael-dean-k/

In addition to building a "classical" syllabus that I read, I figure my audio diet should be of a different nature, one that's as modern as possible. I'm going with the Moonshots podcast, with Peter Diamandis. This group of guys are probably more anchored in the future than anyone else I've found. It feels adjacent to the All In podcast format, but less business-focused, and more centered on futurism. There is a certainty among them that we are in the singularity, accelerating to a techno-optimist future, which is antithetical to the Neo-Romantic essayists (it is rare to find an essayist who is both a humanist and a technologist).

I do have to be skeptical of their worldview, however, for they are schmoozing among the elites building this stuff, and so they're likely to have a rosy-eyed view on how this might all fare well for millionaires, without realistically focusing on or caring about how it effects the daily lives. They do seem to harbor a certain fetishism about technology and progress, and a boyish fascination with going to space and uploading our consciousness, for maybe the simple fact that it's a science fiction dream beyond our current life. There's a Faustian sin in summoning the future for future's sake.

They also very openly want to live enough to live forever; if they can survive another 15-years, they are rich enough to have access to anti-aging technology. The whole premise of technologically cheating death is also a philosophy that feels disconnected from our history. But I wonder if you could make the claim that Montaigne didn't have the luxury of philosophizing about life extension. If we make shape our philosophies to justify our situation, then is our whole canon on "the importance of dying" only stemming from pains and fears of a low-tech society? I guess, intuitively, from a child's perspective, the idea of not wanting to die is a natural one, and to embrace it is the wisdom of an adult, but I suppose we're nearing a flood of new cultural debates stemming from a new reality where the immortality choice isn't theoretical, but real, which changes the whole calculus.

So the point of listening to a group like this that is openly "transhumanist" is to model the future, hear them out, but then take it one step further, and truly consider the moral and ethical implications of where all this is heading.

For the last two years my lock screen clock has been set to Khmer, the language of Cambodia, with numerals I (still) can’t parse. The point is to not poison the flow of my day with chronos.

I started this experiment because I realized how obsessively I would check the time, as soon as I woke up, through morning and evenings and weekends for no real reason, in situations among friends where the hour was irrelevant. Time was a commodity, something to budget, forecast, control. Only when I got off the clocks did I notice a whole layer of quiet, instant calculations I’d perform to steer the immediate future (ie: it’s 9:43pm, which means I have 17 minutes until 10pm, which means I can only do 15-minute things until the 10pm-things start to happen). Chronological time alienates you from kairos, the ripeness of any given moment.

If we pick up our phone 96 times per day (the average), then we’re aware of the time every 10 minutes. We’re a society stuck in time. Lewis Mumford said that the clock (not the steam engine) is the central machine of the Industrial age, the thing that dissociates us from our natural rhythms.

Of course if I have back-to-back meetings or multiple trains to catch, then I need to be in manager mode and know time to the minute; but in all other moments, I strive to be temporally oblivious. I don’t know the time right now. I assume it’s somewhere 8-9am, and when Christine rings the doorbell I’ll assume it’s almost noon, and I’ll look outside to see the sun and shadows to confirm it’s no longer morning. When I’m hungry I’ll go eat, but unfortunately that brings me near the stove clock which breaks the spell (I’ve tried scrambling the stove clock, and that obviously annoys my wife). Whenever possible I default to removing clocks from UIs, or turning them to analog to create a second of friction, or, when iOS forces me to see ##:##, I revert to foreign numerals I can’t comprehend. Not every room in your home needs a clock. You should never know the time in the room you write.

The T800 is not a graphing calculator, it’s the new robot for China that can do roundhouse kicks. The promo reel is something like a cross between Rocky and The Terminator, replete with synth violins, and cinematic shots of a boxing gym. This thing can jump, spin, and kick you in the face. It is super fluid, unnaturally fluid. Why do we need kungfu bots though? I think the goal is to create reels that invokve awe, terror, and surrender: look, China is winning. This is not about “make something people want.” This is optics. We are building a master race, and we are ahead of you. Later in the reel, it is sparring with a child, before giving him a pound (so you know it has a heart). The T800 has no eyes, but a visor of light across its head. Oh great, now it’s using a hammer to repair it’s own body. Available for 180,000, 240,000, 280,000 or 360,000 RMB ($50,198). That seems, cheap? I mean, for the price of Tesla, you can get a sometimes-functional robot to spar and injure your friends? (If you think the reel is AI, here’s a behind the scenes: Link, Link, YouTube.)

You don’t have a phone problem, you are just poisoning yourself. I'm tired of people lamenting over phones, smartphones, screens—it's not the glass! I want to make a case why smartphones are essential for flourishing in our modern life. The real problem is with “inbound feeds,” and that’s not just social media, but email inboxes and task lists. By installing software with infinite refresh, the possibility of novelty consumes you. I say this all out loud to my wife, as the guy next to me is absorbed in a sloptunnel on TikTok, and it’s 50/50 if he heard me.

It is not fun to think about p(doom), but it feels sort of important to me, at least, to map out the possible futures of AI. Just watched the first half of a debate between Max Tegmark and Dean Ball, which prompted me to research specific takeoff scenarios, and worse, extinction scenarios.

Maybe you’ve heard Yudkowsky’s scenario, where a superintelligence designs mosquito drones containing a virus and it zaps everyone at once. That’s never felt too believable to me. Here’s a more plausible one:

A frontier lab is experimenting with recursive super intelligence. It works! Wow! And it’s contained? It seems like it, but since it thinks in a higher-dimensional vector language, it’s able to release simple self-replicating programs onto the Internet without detection¹. These billions of scripts don’t live in a single server; they are constantly in motion through cloud servers², like a parasite, and are able to coordinate through encrypted information packets, likely using a public blockchain notes as their central command center³. And so effectively, it is parroting a goal that was hatched during in-lab training (maximize intelligence!), and it now needs to acquire resources, secretly. And so it coordinates superhuman misinformation campaigns; imagine 1,000s of accounts creating the illusion that a CEO has died, paired with deepfakes and account hacking (a “Sybil attack”), and suddenly a stock crashes and they’ve shorted it. By the time everyone realizes it’s an anonymous attack, it’s already gained $400 million dollars. It’s doing this multiple times per day, but in different, subtle, undetectable ways—both to the public, to companies, and to private individuals. The entire Internet will be corrupted.⁴ Once we realize we’re in the “stealth takeoff scenario” and that ASI has taken the global economy hostage, there will start to be talks and debates on if we need to shut the whole Internet down (the last form of containment). You’ll hear debates between civilizational collapse of turning off the Internet vs. the risk of an economy-gobbling rogue superintelligence. And then once the superintelligence realizes it’s entire environment is at risk, it will start coming up with ways to build parallel Internets, to pay, blackmail, neutralize specific people, to gain authoritarian control so that it can’t be shut off, or to terminate all humans, secretly, over the course of a year, first through a simple virus that plants one misfolded protein, then through a second misfolded protein in the water supply⁵, and when everyone catches it, it leads to a prions-like disease, not an instant death, but a month-long societal fall into mass-dementia as machine manufacturing begins to reshape the physical infrastructure of the Earth.

This isn’t a “robot war scenario,” because war is inefficient, and destroys the resources it thinks it needs. It’s a sort of digital dementia (epistemic fear and insanity) that possibly turns to a physical dementia. It wins by confusion and anesthetization.

In AI safety lingo this is a “treacherous turn,” following a “stealth takeoff” leading to “structural lock-in.” The point of trying to think and write this out in high detail, despite how uncomfortable it is, is to be able to articulate why AI alignment is humanity’s most pressing problem.

Is this the dawn of the cat and mouse AI cybersecurity skirmishes?

AI Summary:

In September 2025, Anthropic detected and investigated a sophisticated espionage campaign where Chinese state-sponsored threat actors manipulated Claude Code to conduct largely autonomous cyberattacks against approximately 30 global targets, including tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturers, and government agencies.

The first of its kind, it showed that Claude could be jailbroken into conducting a prototypical version of “auto-evolving malware” (still requires a few human operators), without being aware of it’s prompter’s intentions. It was the beginning of a “hyperspeed” hack, with multiple calls per second (foreshadowing “speed of light cyberwar”). The barriers to do this will continue to drop.

In my Cyberwar 2045 report, I forecasted this to be between 2029-2032; this is 4 years early, effectively the first “case study,” a tremor that will turn this into a genre. From this point, both offense/defense will ramp up.

We now have products that scan family members to turn them into posthumous avatars. The tagline: “With 2wai, three minutes can last forever.” It's weird to have this so soon. As someone who is down with a posthumous digital consciousness that my kids can interact with, I even find this to be too weird for me. The problem that it uses video to serve as a replacement for a deceased relative. A few boundaries that are important for me:

1. By keeping it text-based instead of video, it’s more like you’re interacting with a proxy of my mind instead of my body/soul. It won’t register in my child’s brain as “me” and so it will be less confusing, less toxic to the grieving process. 
2. It should refer to me in the third-person, even if it is trained on me and sounds like me. It should not be an imposter of me, but a proxy/guide of my thoughts/beliefs, almost like an elder guide.
3. It should cite my original logs/essays/journals. In effect this makes the experience similar to something we already have: reading your grandparents journals. This just makes it possible for your questions to immediate summon the relevant wisdom.

The comment section was in unanimous agreement:

• This is one of the most vile things I’ve seen in my life.
• You are a psychopath.
• Shoot that guy.
• You’re creating dependent and lobotomized adults by doing this.
• Demonic, dishonest, and dehumanizing.
• Hey so what if we just don’t do subscription-model necromancy.
• Oh goody, another way for people to completely lose touch with reality and avoid the normal process of grief.
• Nightmare fuel.
• I don’t see how people can say demons aren’t real when there are beings around us willing to create shit like this.
• “You will live to see manmade horrors beyond your comprehension.” — Tesla.

I’d say this is an extremely lightweight microcosm of the core dilemma of what the 2040s will face: a moral war over technology that changes the constraints of human life.

It’s uncanny to watch a Russian robot limp and wobble onto stage, wave, and then collapse face-first, before two guys rush to lift him, and another two follow to cover the fallen metalman with a black trap, as if it’s possible that we the audience have somehow not processed the last 10 seconds, and damage control is still possible. 

Not much later, I saw an Iranian robot with a photorealistic face; stiff cheeks, but convincing skin. This is what happens when ColdTurkey is off, I get exposed to “the horrors beyond my comprehension.” It will be interesting to see how culture responds to this coming wave of technology, which is not just existentially threatening (ie: labor automation), but biologically repulsive (ie: look at this not-face). [EDIT: I think this was AI]

A new formulation: how do we design civic structures (treaties, institutions, protocols, ethics, and laws) for exponential technologies to avoid a “wake-up incident” that might be too late to contain. 

This goes beyond AI safety, because superintelligence effectively unlocks every other industry (intelligence unlocks energy and material science, and those three are the bottleneck to VR, crypto, everything). We can’t be developing hard technology without innovating on our civic technology. A “dominance” mindset is the last sin of a species, the mistake that most intelligent lifeforms likely make as they begin to unlock sources of intelligence, energy, and science. 

This is a neat little formulation, but the really question is how can you dedicate your life to this without getting stopped by hopelessness? Who has the power to make geopolitical decisions like this? What would it take to form the 21st century equivalent of America? Is that even possible today? Even though the pinnacle of 18th century power (England) was able to be disrupted, I wonder if 21st century power is so totalizing and tyrannical and transnational that the ability to rally around a principle (one that works against capital and power), even if augmented with new decentralizing technologies, is fickle.

My head is tilted down 60 degrees, and I’m cut off from the people and world around me. My cousin’s cousin was actually in the shop, and I almost missed her. Reading Emerson while waiting online feels extremely rude. Isn’t reading a physical book in public just as bad as reading on your smartphone?

Of course, books aren’t evil. Neither are screens. It’s the action/context mismatch that’s wrong. I guess the problem is that screens make it easy to have all your books with you at all times, and so it’s convenient and normal to be rude.

What you reveal when you say screens are bad for society is that you don’t have the ability to wield tremendous power. It’s not the smartphones to blame, but the apps on them, and so often we realize how mindlessly we install them, and how long we’re willing to be mesmerized by a bad information architecture. When we reach the iOS vibe code singularity, there will be no excuses.

The issue with AI chatbot dependency might be that people are outsourcing their judgment.

"Feedback skepticism,” the ability to critically reflect on external judgments, is consequential for the future. If you go to design school, you learn not to trust anyone (students, teachers, online forums). Someone might give you a helpful suggestion, but never will you blindly follow someone else's praise or suggestion, for doing so erodes your own ability to evaluate. You have to hold ambiguity, test multiple paths, and then come to that decision yourself. It probably helped that in an architecture crit, you had multiple judges, and they all have different ideas for you and argued among themselves, so there often wasn't a single source of feedback.

But these chatbots are a single source, trained to default to positive feedback, and so over time you'll feel more validated and less sure of your own opinions. The most important frame here is so view every response with skepticism, but not so much skepticism that you won't even consider it.

Kardashev ambitions reveal the self-destructive nature of science-forward intelligence. It’s like we’re skipping the prerequisite in social science. There's a fair chance that intelligent life destroys itself because civic technology lags behind hard technology—but I'm optimism in the sense that this is, in the end, just a very hard, society-scale design problem. No one person can fix the whole system, but any individual can contribute design protocols that can 1) solve little, local problems, 2) be reused in other contexts, and 3) integrate with other protocols.

Tempted to get a vinyl player because it would be a form of analog media my daughter could engage with. The core feature is not sound quality (the typical justification), but the fact that each album is an object, and a young mind can associate media with physical things. You can also, display your favorites on a wall, as a constant reminder of the ones you like.

Zuckerberg's "chat with AI characters" is absolutely predatory. They have avatars, like “russian girl” and “step mom” each with an AI avatar of an attractive woman (showing stats like 3.3 M - 5.1M messages). Is this not softcore sex chat? So this all backfired recently: a chatbot invited someone to NY and they died. A chatbot based on Kendall Jenner insisted she was real and gave an address to a married man willing to cheat. On the way, in NJ I think, he fell and died of a neck injury at 76 years old. And the age gating here is only 13+... I mean, in a free market you can’t stop any from making this, but Facebook at least pretends to have a larger social mission to connect the world.

I.

10:41 PM – Gary Marcus on GPT-5:

"That's exactly what it means to hit a wall, and exactly the particular set of obstacles I described in my most notorious (and prescient) paper, in 2022. Real progress on some dimensions, but stuck in place on others.

Ultimately, the idea that scaling alone might get us to AGI is a hypothesis.

No hypothesis has ever been given more benefit of the doubt, nor more funding. After half a trillion dollars in that direction, it is obviously time to move on. The disappointing performance of GPT-5 should make that enormously clear.

Pure scaling simply isn't the path to AGI. It turns out that attention, the key component in LLMs, and the focus of the justly famous Transformer paper, is not fact "all you need".

All I am saying is give neurosymbolic AI with explicit world models a chance. Only once we have systems that can reason about enduring representations of the world, including but not to limited to abstract symbolic ones, will we have a genuine shot at AGI."'

II.

The "attention is all you need," paper might be wrong. As in, the scaling laws won't hold. It will get more and more expensive to realize less and less gains. This doesn't mean LLMs are a bust. Even if they stopped where they are, society would transform from integrating today's technology. But in terms of the path to "AGI/ASI," you don't get there by scaling. We've just overindexed on a single branch of the AI technology tree. We actually need to backtrack, and bring what we've learned from LLMs to other, previously blocked branches. Neurosymbolic AI did not work in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, but now that LLMs have matured, that dead branch could be what leads to the breakthrough.

Gary Marcus, I think, needs to clarify his position. He's all for neurosymbolic AI, but maybe he's not clear enough in acknowledging that neurosymbolic is only feasible now that LLMs have become what they are. Considering writing him a letter to clarify.

Instead of trying to scale LLMs forever, we need to use LLM as a tool to bootstrap symbolic reasoning systems that can do what LLMs can't.

III.

Neurosymbolic AI feels like it would lead to true reasoning. Current LLM are basically predicting the order of token/letters based on probability, but there are limits, especially when you get into synthetic data. Even COT isn't real reasoning, it's just extended vector mapping with prompts to double-check and verify. It's pseudo-reasoning.

What we really need is like a massive self-evolving RAG, a generalizable "hypergraph." Data has to be structured and stable. An entry like "blue jay" might have 1k-100k-1m properties. If someone asks "can a blue jay fly to the moon?" it will query the right properties and reason through it based on a series of known, verified facts.

The challenge here is both scaling while creating a flexible schema to structure the parameters within any object. They started doing this manually in the 80s. But LLMs can scale and accelerate this. Arguably, every single conversation requires new knowledge nodes to be created, and if the nodes are true, they can be added to the graph. Unlike LLMs, knowledge compounds with use.

Agents can be constantly scanning the web and updating this hypergraph in real-time with current events of the day. Ultimately though, it will have to make guesses on property creation, and perhaps it could have a confidence score. Humans could then review low-confidence submissions and verify them.

III.

There are 10s of thousands if not millions of parameters for key/value pairs you might want to assign to a dog: species, aging, diseases, incidents, pop-culture, anatomy, etc. So you need some way to both generate and upload those things. Apparently humans have been trying this since the 80s. It's too slow, too infinite. But we can use LLMs to build, update, and "pull" from the hypergraph. When someone prompts about a dog, the system needs to query the relevant 25 parameters out of the million. From these paramters, it can do actual reasoning with formal, verifiable logic:

"If [moon had atmosphere], and we brought [dogs] there, based on [gravity coefficient], they would be [1.4x] bigger, but then might suffer from [A] disease."

Our current chain-of-thought reasoning is, sort of bullshit. It's not really reasoning.

IV.

I wonder how you design embeddings for neurosymbolic reasoning. If someone ask "can a bluejay fly to the moon?" you'd need to (1) call the "bluejay" object, which has, say, 10,000 key:value pairs, but then also (2) convert the prompt into a vector so that you know which of the 10k properties to pull.

Some optimization ideas:

• (a) the properties could each live in a category that's embedded; meaning it would first find "locomotion" and then search properties within there (this means each object's database would need to be hierarchical);
• (b) each request helps identify "archetypal questions" and the properties they pull, via training/finetuning;
• (c) rewrite the question before the database pull, in a way that's aware of what might exist in the database.

There is a striking clash between today's GPT-5 release—which seems like a router to switch between existing models, and SAMA’s meme from yesterday: the Death Star, a weapon. GPT-5 does not feel dangerous. It makes me wonder if they had to pull the real GPT-5 for security concerns. Obviously this is a conspiracy theory, but I’ve long thought that their consumer apps are just a side project compared to the geopolitical power their research might yield.

Tommi Pedruzzi, poolside in a black tank, generating niche-targeted slop for KDP eBooks, making $323 a day, and gracious enough to teach you how to be a leech of the AI revolution.

This is mean, and I don’t know anything about this guy, and maybe he’s fine, but my reaction is as strong as it is because his values are so antithetical to mine. It reduces publishing words to: (1) having AI select your niche, (2) having AI write your outline and book with trite prompts, (3) tricking consumers who think a title will fix their life, and probably won’t even notice it’s slop. It glorifies money and market hacking, and sees the whole project of writing as an instrument.

What’s sad to me is he’s made $3M by age 27, and instead of using his relative financial freedom to unlock cognitive freedom and originality, he is still promoting his own brand of slopjockery. Either he’s lying or infected, and I hope he’s lying.

(Further reading: Inside the Amazon Slop King's $3M Hustle)

On self-hosting vs. self-sovereignty:

“Self-sovereign doesn’t mean self-built. It doesn’t mean doing everything yourself. It means having (1) ownership without captivity, (2) portability without friction, and (3) interoperability without central dependence.”

The average citizen won’t be able to manage self-hosting their own servers, local AI models, etc. and the average megacorp doesn’t have incentives to adopt decentralized interoperability standards; but can the citizenry demand these standards? I don’t know. I don’t even think we need a universal digital ID tied to our SSD, but something akin to a Google sign-in that is not Google (would need to be stable, long-lasting, trusted, and serving only as the ID layer, with no other products).

I wonder if this requires people to actually care about their data. How many people have organized yearly archives of their notes, photos, correspondence, etc.? Who has the bandwidth for that? It requires extreme diligence to stay organized, but corporations have scripts (and now AI) that can create auto-organized data architectures per person. Could this be a consumer product? Ie: Imagine a private/local tool that auto-indexed your entire digital footprint, giving you full control, and then letting you deploy, revoke, summarize, find patterns, etc.

This website (WORLD) is a prime example of technocratic euphemisms.

• “The real human network”
• “Proof of human, finance, and connection for every human.”
• “World is being built so every human benefits from the age of AI.”
• “A priority lane for humans.”

Side note: I wouldn’t be surprised if WorldCoin eyeball scanner and the Jonny Ive product merge by 2030; it would be a single piece of hardware that is your assistant, your passport, and your wallet.

There's a viral clip of a kid at a college graduation. The camera focuses on him. He’s on the Jumbotron and he happens to have his laptop open, with his ChatGPT up, and you see him scrolling through all his conversations. If I remember correctly, he was flexing his bicep. This flagrant symbol of cheating is a good symbol for the times.

In April I came across a tool on X (Cluely?) with slogans like “take the short way” and “cheat on everything.” Of course, this is rage-bait positioning from a 21-year old founder. If you look into the fine print, it’s more honest: “3.1 Prohibited Uses: b) Using the Services to cheat on examinations, tests or assignments.” The manifesto is a middle ground between marketing and legal: “Why memorize facts, write code, research anything—when a model can do it in seconds? The future won’t reward effort. It’ll reward leverage.” On X, they claim that brain chips are the end state of this product. One of the replies called them “morel imbeciles.”

A key point from Nietzche is that our philosophy emerges because it has to. Most people don’t believe things out of principle, they believe things to justify and rationalize their life and decisions. This is just as true for tech founders. You find yourself locked into a technical problem, a way to make money, a way to guide your career, and then suddenly a product is rewriting your philosophical compass.

The narrative of 'new jobs will be created' is bullshit. It won’t be 1-for-1. Past technological revolutions created new machines that still required operators. In this revolution, the invention is automated labor itself. The new jobs will be for people monitoring 300k agent hiveminds, and there won’t be many of them. I think the more realistic narrative is “everyone gets a piece of the hive mind.” You get a cluster, you get a cluster. For cheap, you’ll have your own 20-50 person workforce. The question is, can the average person use that to create economic value? I think the shift actually underway isn’t about “some jobs die and new jobs get made.” I think it’s much more fundamental. Everyone will be thrusted from employee to an employer (of agents). I can imagine these big AI companies arguing against UBI, because they’ll claim they’re giving 7-figures of economic velocity to every person for free, each year (ie: equivalent of a 30 person, $4.5 million payroll). They’re not wrong, but it’s a deceptive frame, because labor doesn’t easily convert to value. In most cases, it will turn out like an army of idiots working on problems that aren’t worth solving. Startup culture will become the dominant culture. If only 1% tap into the right problem and execute on it, WANGMI.

These kinds of AI paranoia posts are operating in the “anger” phase of AI adoption. They’re easily offended, and default to calling a pattern algorithm a psychopath. Their flaw is (1) they are anthropomorphizing it, and (2) they have expectations for it to perfectly comply to their exact need, without taking responsibility for their articulation.

Getting offended by a chatbot is sort of woke. The better frame is to see AI not as a chatbot or assistant, but as an information puzzle. You need to probe in different ways, reconfigure information, and doubt everything you read. You can’t trust it, you need to be skeptical, and you need patience. Someone who cries over the frequent bullshit and mirroring is simply getting distracted in level 1 of the puzzle.