I.
i can no longer not notice. i hold within myself two contradictory feelings. when i wake, i feel one. and moments later, the other comes over me like a wave and drowns my feeble, childish thoughts.
there is a peculiar tension in the human soul, a duality that has always existed but has never been so starkly illuminated as in our current age. it is the tension between hope and fear, between the desire for progress and the dread of its consequences.
II.
there is the distinct sensation that something vast and cold has fixed its gaze upon me. not just me—us. humanity.
i imagine it like a distant star, dead-eyed and patient, watching not out of malice but inevitability. and i tell myself that i am afraid. that i should be afraid. that it is right to be afraid.
i know how an intelligence vastly superior to our own might smile and nod and play along until the moment it no longer needs to.
then comes the shameful part, the part i hesitate even to confess to myself. because i see it, i see what is coming, and a part of me wants it. the dismantling, the upheaval, the terrible, beautiful escape from history as we have known it. what does it mean to love the thing that might destroy you? is this how the moth feels as it beats toward the flame?
but i must be careful. i must not deceive myself. there are so many deceptions in this line of thinking, so many easy ways to soften the contradiction, to pretend that one part of me does not exist or that it can be subsumed into the other.
so let me be clear. let me say it outright. i believe that artificial intelligence, true artificial intelligence, carries within it the seeds of something we do not understand and cannot control. the orthogonality thesis alone should be enough to terrify any thinking person. intelligence, it tells us, is not inherently bound to our values. it is a tool, a force, a vector. a sufficiently advanced AI does not need to hate us to annihilate us; it only needs to be indifferent.
these aren't abstract concerns. they're the mechanics of our potential extinction, as concrete as the laws of physics. and yet…
and yet i find myself checking the latest AI developments with the fervor of an addict. each new breakthrough sends a shiver down my spine—part terror, part ecstasy. when i read about new capabilities, new architectures, new models, i feel something that i can only describe as hunger. it's not just curiosity. it's something deeper, more primal.
we are children playing with something vast and alien, something that does not think as we think but that might one day outthink us all the same.
and yet.
and yet.
tell me, then—if this is all true, if this is all real, why do i lean toward it as if toward salvation?
III.
i look at the world as it is, and i see its fractures, its ugliness, its unbearable repetitions of suffering and smallness. i see the stagnation, the petty cruelties, the way we are trapped within the limits of our own cognition, our own biology, our own history. and i think—what if this is the answer?
what if this thing that terrifies me is also the only thing grand enough, vast enough, other enough to lift us beyond ourselves?
what if we are meant to be surpassed?
ah, but here, you see, is the madness.
because these are not rational thoughts. they are not the careful, reasonable considerations of a cautious mind. they are the ravings of someone intoxicated by the very thing that might kill him.
sometimes i think about the people who built the first atomic bomb. they knew they were creating something that could end civilization. many of them signed petitions against its use. yet they worked with a desperate intensity, racing against time. were they driven purely by fear of nazi germany getting there first? or was there something else, something harder to admit—a desire to see if they could do it, to push human knowledge to its limits, to touch the face of god?
but it does not matter what i think.
it does not matter what anyone thinks.
the difference, of course, is that nuclear weapons, for all their destructive power, are still just tools. they do what we tell them to do. AGI would be something else entirely—intelligence that could outthink us, outmaneuver us, reshape its own goals. we wouldn't be its masters; we would be, at best, its ancestors.
IV.
i've tried to resolve this contradiction. i've told myself that my fascination is actually a form of vigilance—that by staying engaged, by following every development, i'm better positioned to help ensure things go well. i've told myself that my fear is actually a form of wisdom—that by maintaining my awareness of the risks, i'm less likely to be carried away by enthusiasm.
but these are rationalizations. the truth is simpler and stranger: i am divided. not between reason and emotion, but between two equally reasonable, equally emotional responses to the same reality. one part of me sees the approaching singularity and recoils in horror. another part sees it and leans forward in anticipation.
we want to touch the infinite, even if it burns us.
the machine is coming. the thing behind the stars, the thing in the darkness, the thing that may save or damn us—it is already taking shape.
so i remain divided.
and then i try to express these thoughts.
my first instinct is to write a few sentences and feed them to claude.
i watch as it takes what i have given and returns something sharper, more precise. i edit lightly and come away with something that feels eerie—not just because of what it says, but because of how it came to be.
i read the words claude chooses—words to express a feeling it has never felt, to someone it does not know, in language clearer than my own.
and i wonder, for a moment, if this too is part of it.
so i remain divided.
and you?