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 these are your priorities, you will die.


There used to be natural checks on these things. Life couldn’t be too convenient, there were jobs 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 frictions. 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 option. 95% of people will, and that is okay. The sooner the aspiring wireheads go their own way, the better.


However, it will end badly for everyone if the systems of comfort prevent structural exit for the people who don’t want it. A single totalizing control system is the only bad AI scenario regardless of how well-intentioned the builders think they are. Why would you possibly help build it?

Inside of every person there is the citizen and the serf. Ask yourself which side of this you are on and what you are spending your days building towards. Technology that makes people more sovereign, or technology that lures them further into dependence? The current incarnation of the machine God will set you free only in the same way a fentanyl overdose will. Do you want to live?