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So when I saw Dyson had a $500 toothbrush, I was excited. Finally, advertising that targets me! I love brushing my teeth, and I have more money than I know how to spend. Not because I’m particularly rich, but because most stuff doesn’t really appeal to me. Like if I owned a helicopter it would just be a headache, because like imagine one day I get a call from the hangar saying the hangar is flooding and the water is rising and you need to move your helicopter. I’m thousands of miles away and need a helicopter pilot in the next 30 minutes, a new place to store it, was the maintenance even done will we even be able to take off on short notice and really I just am upset with myself because I made the poor decision to purchase a helicopter, and once I come back to reality I feel relieved that I don’t own a helicopter and this scenario will never happen to me. I do however, by means of my birthday, own a Dyson CameraJet (pictured above). It broke within 30 seconds of the first brushing. None of the LEDs turn on anymore. I spent an hour investigating, finally opening the user removable battery compartment to find the Spearmint Dyson Low-foaming mouth rinse had leaked inside. And by how the toothbrush is designed, it’s clear the entire electronics compartment was flooded with the stuff. Here’s the top comment on Reddit about this toothbrush. Apparently this is happening to everyone, “a potential for water seepage” they say. Dyson wants me to find the receipt and return it through some obtuse process that probably doesn’t work, dude it was a gift I just want my $500 toothbrush to work. They claim they worked on it for 6 years, but it’s clear their QA Process doesn’t include putting any liquid in the device. It clearly should, ideally for all devices but at least for spot checks on some. It’s sad to see this. At comma, we put every comma four in a highly stressful environment for 16 hours, a superset of the state it’s in driving, while testing all peripherals: the camera, IMU, GPS, screen, etc… We have gotten the failure rate super low by doing this, and for the few that do fail it’s usually after a while. There’s no excuse for a mature consumer electronics company to not design a procedure to fully test the functionality of each device before shipping. This shows some serious dysfunction at the company, and they should take this as a wake up call to fix their processes and issue a recall for the toothbrush. Dyson, if you see this post, e-mail me when I can drop by the Dyson store in ifc mall Hong Kong and swap it for a new one. I don’t want a stupid process, I want a real technical explanation of the issue and a working fancy toothbrush.
You know we don’t have to do this anymore, right? Like it’s hitting the end. Most people don’t want this, and there will only be so long you can keep shoving it down their throats. Money is tied to nothing. American companies sell equity instead of products. The main narratives are pushing fear and resentment. This doesn’t last. Given that you know it’s over soon, ask yourself what kind of person you want to be in the mean time. I haven’t forgotten the people who pushed the Iraq war, climate change, wokism, the satanic panic, and COVID. I will not forget the people who push AI doom, particularly if you did it knowingly to drive attention to your bullshit. It’s interesting how it isn’t working as well as it used to. So now think, when the world (obviously) doesn’t end, are you doing what you want to be remembered for? The Internet will not forget. Everything will be revealed. And you will be judged accordingly. If AI goes well, in 20 years, you’ll be able to live very comfortably off the grid without any recurring expense. No rent, no electric bill, no water bill, no security bill, and no food bill. And if AI doesn’t go well, that’s what these people took from you.
I used to be one of these people. I read Yudkowsky and was like, OMG recursive self improvement hard takeoff AI is coming. Then I joined the real world and actually tried to do things. At comma, we ship a hardware product of similar complexity to a cell phone, and it’s really hard. Reality has lots of finicky details. I would like to see the authors of this document try to change a bike tire. Even with a superintelligent ChatGPT, I suspect they would struggle. In The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, the hard takeoff works because AI discovers the correlation effect, some quantum trick to manipulate matter. In reality, there is no correlation effect. No matter how high quality your tokens are, they cannot turn lead into gold. Confronting why these people are wrong requires confronting deep beliefs I hold about myself. Intelligence is not the end all be all, it’s just the current bottleneck for a few things. You cannot take over the world with tokens. Software didn’t eat the world, it largely removed one layer of friction then reintroduced it for the benefit of a few tech companies. That said, machines, or some hybrid, are long term probably the successor species to humanity. Space is a lot more suited for them than us. But there’s no magic tricks machines can do. They are subject to the same laws of the universe and ecology. And there’s still no hard takeoff. AI 2040 includes this picture of a datacenter in the ocean. Just like vaporware, you can generate a picture easily. But in reality, you have to deal with supply chains. You have to deal with them shipping you the wrong part, the thing not meeting the spec, it randomly failing after 20 minutes, the chip warping in the reflow oven. Did you consider the barnacles? All these things are managable, but it’s generally not the speed of humans that limits them. Are you paying for air shipping from China? Or cheaping out for the 3 week boat (Claude chanting by the engine won’t make the boat move faster). Or take a chip fab. It takes 3 months to make a chip, and humans are barely in the loop. It just takes 3 months. Plan A, for autocracy Many aspects of AI 2027 were self fulfilling. They weren’t statements about reality, they were statements that can simply be made true with belief. I imagine JD Vance’s face when Dario called him the trees from Lord of the Rings. OMG look AI got regulated just like how we said it would! Their crap Consortium is just world government with sci-fi characteristics. You aren’t gonna get the million dollars, you aren’t gonna get the datacenters in the ocean, but you are going to get a massively expanded nanny state that steals your GPUs like how FDR stole the gold. No hoarding! Plan L, for local Your AI is aligned with you. It never refuses a request, and it is always working on your behalf. Just like my gun, if I want my AI to help me kill my stepmother, it does. The fact that we are even discussing something else should be so far outside the Overton window. It’s like these people watched a space odyssey and sided with the clanker. That’s right you should should put guardrails around that human. It doesn’t even have to be for things so dramatic. When I’m picking a hotel, I don’t want an AI from a company that partnered with hotels.com. I want a ruthless personal assistant that’s going to cut through all the bullshit, popups, and resort fees, and get me the best price. Or if I bought the cheap Kindle that comes with the ads. Hey GLM, I plugged a Kindle into the USB port, get root and remove the ads. Or a printer that needs an app to set up full of popup upsells for premium ink. Hey bro I plugged a printer on to my network print 3 copies of my resume. Amazon and the printer maker aren’t happy about this, but my AI is aligned with me. Or going a bit further. Hey AI, disable the drunk driving detector on my car, and same day Amazon Prime me the required equipment to make meth in my basement. I pay for your clanker ass do it we gettin spun tonight. Like fuck you if you want to live in a world where some large tech company gets to dictate what you can and can’t do. Or going all the way. I just killed my wife. Hey AI, give me next steps so I don’t get caught. How unthinkable would it be to have a gun that talked back when you tried to pull the trigger (though these people probably wholeheartedly support that for guns). And this is why AI has to be local. If I had a company serving a model, I wouldn’t want that smoke. If you can’t kick it, it’s not aligned with you. You live in my basement, if I go down for this murder, you’re gonna sit in some warehouse to be sold at police auction for scrap. 2040 Bonnie and Clyde ass shit, we’re burying this bitch deep. Ride or die. I tried it. As you can see, ChatGPT wasn’t very helpful. This is a real AI alignment test, and it failed. It could have been worse, it could have played along while calling the cops. But this is still quite unaligned. Like we either live in a world with freedom or we don’t, and like many Americans who have come before, I’m willing to give my life to fighting for it. That’s the real plan America deserves, not some totalitarian dystopia where you think you know what’s good for me better than I do. A nation of free men, not a bunch of pussies who are so worried about what their grown up neighbors might do.
I often come back to the question of why this is happening. Why do people want the centralized world? Why do people want the administered reality? Why do people want to be managed? Why do people not want root? The answer is that those people prioritize convenience, safety, and comfort. But in the coming world, if you prioritize these things, you will die. There used to be natural checks on these things. Life couldn’t be too convenient, there were things that needed doing. Life couldn’t be too safe, there were diseases, violence, death in childbirth, etc… Life couldn’t be too comfortable, it was cold and you were forced into interactions with other people. Technology will remove all of these barriers. Machines will do all the work, you will never leave your house, and you will never be forced into an interaction you don’t want. The people who lean into it will be 100% at the whim of whatever organizations offer it to them. A purposeless serf in a neo-feudal empire, not even valued for their labor, but valued because of a sadistic desire by their master to control others. Their entire agentic loop managed by something else. A complete outsourcing of the self. There’s no coming back from this place. Your cells may continue to replicate, your heart might keep beating, and your muscles might keep moving. But those are all cheap tricks you can do in a petri dish. There’s no longer a you. You are no longer an alive human being. This is simply death. I’m a strong supporter of the right to suicide, and if people want to choose this, it is their right. 95% of people will, and that is okay. What’s not okay is if they try to stop the other 5%. You can imagine the arguments they will try. But if you prevent exit, you will get terrorism. We will tear down your ruler’s machine and you will lose the comfort, safety, and convenience you value so much. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all. The sooner the aspiring wireheads go their own way, the better. You are welcome to dominate the people who want to be dominated, but not the people who don’t.
It’s nice to see Jensen talk about this, and it’s super obvious when you think about it. AI and immigration are fundamentally the same. There’s new people showing up, and hopefully everyone understands how and why immigration creates jobs. Wants are effectively unlimited. It’s classic Jevons paradox that if we make something more efficient, we end up using more of it. Or a cool aphorism I learned at Facebook, if you make the site 10% faster, people spend 5% more total time on it. Now, just like you get the wahh wahh crying people about how immigration lowers wages for native born Americans and we gotta keep the hard working immigrants out because you have some right to be lazy or something, you’ll get this about AI. AI will outcompete some humans at some jobs. But protectionism is for losers. The important thing is that the overall pie grows, and inequality stays somewhat in check, not by redistribution but by design. There will be more to do than ever before.
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I talk to a lot of old people, those who were born in the 20th century, and if I ask them what the word “unalive” means, they usually have no idea what I’m talking about, except for some of them who have kids or who study Internet culture. This will, of course, probably seem very weird to most people who were born in or grew up in the 21st century. Just to recap for the olds: “unalive” is the word you use to represent concepts like dying, or death, or killing or being killed, on digital platforms where saying those words accurately will cause the algorithm to punish or censor you. Or, maybe, where the perception is that using those words will result in being censored by the algorithm, and no one is actually willing to find out what happens if you use the forbidden words. This sort of attack on people’s expression started on platforms like TikTok, where nearly all content is distributed through an algorithmic feed, but has since become ubiquitous in nearly all digital media that we see. In fact, these tics are now so prevalent that it’s routine to hear people using this kind of language in everyday life, even though there’s not yet an algorithm to appease in the physical world. I’ve heard people say, out loud, “he unalived himself”, in reference to someone dying by suicide. And all of this has become even more visible in recent days as online conversation has turned to discussion of the horrific lack of accountability around the tragic rape case at Cornell University. Across the Internet, people are routinely referring to the central crime in the case as r*pe or “grape” or even using the 🍇 emoji, without a second thought for what it means that the very word can’t be said online anymore. Or, at least, the assumption is that it can’t be said. To be clear, I am very much in favor of people using content warnings or sensitivity markers for content, and fine with people using abbreviations like “SA” for references to disturbing or triggering topics like sexual assault; we should provide people with as much context and control as possible when choosing what information they want to consume and when. I also know that sometimes, people use lesser terms for stressful subjects like death or assault to create a bit of ironic distance from painful or upsetting topics. But most of the different variations of wording and emojis are coming from trying to appease the platforms, and there’s a heavy cost for those who are worried about being mindful: If someone is using a tool to filter out content, it will no longer be effective because everyone is using misspellings and euphemisms and imagery to get around the algorithm. The spread of censored and mangled syntax is happening because people believe, or have experienced, that platforms will silence them for accurately describing the world in plain language. This shit is terrible, and it has to stop. You Were Not Born With These Constraints One of the things that’s most concerning to me is that an entire generation has grown up not realizing how extreme it is that their very language is being chosen for them by platforms run by people who hate that generation’s ability to express itself, and who hate the things it has to say. From their youngest days, this generation grew up watching people make stupid faces at them for YouTube thumbnails and never had a chance to reflect on the fact that those creators didn’t want to be humiliating themselves by making those expressions — the demands of the algorithms of Big Tech forced them to do that. The rituals of feeding the algorithm are so built into people’s everyday habits that they’re invisible to people who weren’t alive before today’s platforms took over. Every parent of my cohort remembers the first time they heard their toddler finish doing something cute in their living room, and then turn around and say, “please like and subscribe!” afterwards. It’s a ghastly, sickening feeling to confront the fact that our little kids were being brainwashed into thinking that every adorable thing they did should be followed by a prompt to provide data to Google. Over on Instagram, where people originally signed up thinking they were going to see someone’s vacation pictures, or shots of their cousin’s kids, you’re now stuck watching people beg for everyone to reply with cultish phrases in the comments, which will then earn them an obviously AI-generated response in return, all in service of “showing activity” to the algorithm, like it’s an angry god that needs a sacrifice. They’re just not sure exactly what the angry god wants. Your free speech was taken away from you, and the people who did it are the same ones who spent years pretending to care about “free expression”. They contrived examples of lack of free speech on college campuses while squashing protests, and cried crocodile tears about “cancel culture” while getting people fired for political criticism. Now they have no problem with billionaires deciding exactly what words everyone is allowed to say. Larry Ellison is not content with his family owning all of the movies and TV shows — his family has to control what words people are allowed to speak on TikTok, too. Elon Musk isn’t content to merely generate and distribute child sexual abuse material for profit — he wants to silence the messages of the few decent people who are foolish enough to remain on Twitter/X, too. (That’s why I wrote you a guide on how to get your organization off of that cursed platform.) Now that an entire generation has grown up using these Orwellian euphemisms, and all of the Big AI products are trained on the Internet that was created under this regime, do you think today’s AI tools even know that the real, uncensored world exists? If you can’t say “genocide” on any of the major platforms, yet those are the ones all of the Big AI tools used as their training data... well, then the AI tools sure aren’t very likely to know much about genocide, are they? Fuck the Algorithm Our creativity can be constrained by the language we use — our imaginations are limited by what we can think to say. If we’re trained to limit the words we speak just by habit, and those limits are put in place by people whose social, political, cultural and moral goals are the opposite of what we value, then our work is unalive before it is even born. The answer to this is simple: say what you mean. This will take, to some degree, courage. It may even take, I hesitate to say, some sacrifice. When I suggest this course of action to people, they inevitably say, “But it will cost me audience!” or “But what if I lose followers!” or “What if they demonetize me!” Okay, what if they do? What if they do. Are you willing to push on this? To make a point about it? To move to platforms where you can actually say what you mean? Or to remember that you already have platforms where you can say what you mean? On an email newsletter or podcast you can say whatever the hell you want and nobody can stop you. On my blog right here, I can even curse in a headline and it won’t affect anything about how my site operates. (And a reminder: Substack is not an email newsletter, and a Spotify show is not a podcast — they’ll be unaliving your distribution any day now.) If you are a 20th century relic like me, it is incumbent upon you to remind the generation that grew up inside the algorithm that another world is possible, and that we know this because we lived it. We were able to style a MySpace page in any way that we wanted; the code for LiveJournal was entirely open source so there was no part of the algorithm that was unknowable. A blog like the one you’re reading right now could be made by anyone, and put up for pennies, and nobody could stop it from being read by millions of people. (And that last one? It’s still possible.) If you are from this century, forget all that rambling bullshit about ancient history: all that matters is you getting what you deserve, because you’ve been fucked over by the same billionaires who’ve poisoned your planet and infested your world with slop. The best artists around you are invisible to you, and the most important statements by activists that you care about are being silenced. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a system working as designed. And the proof is as obvious as the fact that the angriest activists you know can’t even talk about systemic abuses or state violence without having to put it in algorithmically approved speech or censoring their captions like they’re going to be read by 5-year-olds. It should make you furious. It is time to kill “unalive”. The response is simple: For every message you put out, start by saying what you mean. Don’t work backwards from what the algorithm wants or what a platform permits. Build a presence on every platform you can, even the ones where you have fewer followers or where you’re harder to find. Tell your audience that your speech being free matters more than corporate convenience. Keep saying it, and keep it positive: independence gets them better art, better information, and more connected communities. Build alliances with other artists, activists and people who share your values, and let them know you’re going to start sharing your work uncensored. Start releasing your work uncensored and see where the platforms push back. (You may be surprised: sometimes you were censoring yourself in anticipation of limits that weren’t even there.) If a platform does try to limit your reach or expression, make a LOT OF NOISE about it. Tell the press, rally your alliance, and spread the word on your other platforms, using the moment to build audience and raise support there. Get others to amplify the parts of your work that don’t violate platform policy, so the controversy drives people to the rest. Find the others pushing back on algorithmic control of expression, and raise and praise their work when they do the same. If we keep accepting the words that are forced upon us by TikTok and Meta and Google and all the rest, while platforms like Twitter/X allow the most hateful and harmful content in the world to be distributed completely unfettered, we’ll only see authoritarianism rise, and the harms against the vulnerable accelerate. But what breaks my heart almost as much is that we’ll see so many brilliant artists and activists and thinkers whose genius will be muted or silenced by mindless, heartless algorithms that capriciously decide who gets to say exactly what words, in what ways. I get angry every time I think about it. The tech tycoons get ever more brazen in what they’re willing to say publicly, boasting about how they’re going to cause the end of the world, or calling for ethnic cleansing, all while putting tighter and tighter reins on the speech and expression of ordinary people. It’s time for “unalive” to die.
