It’s crazy how much Fullmetal Alchemist mimics how AI is playing out. We pour human souls into a philosopher’s stone that we think will solve all our problems and cure death. It doesn’t exactly do this, but you can use it to create homunculi that behave like people, Chat, Claude, GLM. The homunculus is a puree of the souls that were used to create it.

It’s easy to rage against the bubble and the hype, but unlike previous bubbles that isn’t really the problem. All marketing and frame aside, the problem is the AI itself. It demoralizes you without being better than you – not because the current AI is good, but because the next one will be so much better. And while maybe I wish it wasn’t like that, I don’t think it’s wrong.

And I don’t really wish it wasn’t like that, may you live in exciting times and all that. This has been my dream for years – even these feelings aren’t new, when I read Yudkowsky at 15 I became really depressed, I started failing at school, computers would be able to do everything better than us. But then I realized computers couldn’t do these things yet. They still can’t. But it feels close. I don’t think it always felt close? 1e25, 1e26, 1e27…is it just this simple? I don’t know, and you don’t either.

We’re in a middle place, and we’ve been here for a while. Here are some lyrics from 2017:

You can hear it all over the airwaves
The manufactured gasp of the final days
Someone should tell them ‘bout the time that they don’t have
To praise the glorious future and the hopeless past

Now is so the time to make Cruise. It’s a movie about control. An Apple TV style couple who is paranoid in their progressive ways. Psychiatry, autism, activism, ADHD meds. Some reactionary college kids so angry they want to blow up a cruise ship. Incels, brainrotted, purposeless. But at the bottom of it all is a coping with fear of not being in control. And with an ending that subverts expectations, leaves you unfulfilled, and was always how it was going to be.

Do you want to get a job at a frontier AI lab, or do you want to blow up a datacenter? Either way, you are not in control, but you might fool yourself with the illusion. The best is when you have security and know you do. It’s okay if you don’t have security and know you don’t. It’s really bad if you don’t have security and know you do. We don’t get to control the territory, but we do get to draw the map. The only knob we get is how shitty we want to make it. The best we can all do is be honest.

I wish everyone would see this. The real secret has always been that they have no secrets. The real conspiracy is not that there’s lizard people in a basement controlling everything, it’s that there aren’t.

We are all riding on the same bus through the optimization landscape of reality. Shouting at the driver to no avail. The wall mounted map is covered in graffiti so we don’t know where the bus is going. We see cliffs out the window and some pray and some try to shift their weight and some try screaming louder.

Perhaps someday we’ll have a theory of all of this. But today we don’t – we are speeding up the control loop and collapsing the mode and hacking the reward function – it’s all just vibes like how deep learning is vibes. Maybe with how the veil of computability works it has to be vibes?