It’s not megalomania, it’s despair dressed as ambition
The “we’re building god” framing isn’t necessarily about ego, or maybe not only about ego.( Let’s be honest about a lot of the AI-Bros we are talking about here.)
If we start to think about how Mythos or its successors could run a sensitive finger along any deployed system and find vulnerabilities, can we be sure that the models themselves do not become an attack vector?
The recursive horror
When you can’t trust Trust itself, you need the concept of an all-wise, incorruptible, beneficent overseer.
You can’t trust the humans reviewing the output because they’re increasingly dependent on the model to understand what they’re reviewing.
You can’t trust the patch when it might be a clever payload.
You can’t fully trust the system that generated the patch if we can’t understand what it is doing.
You can’t trust the scan that validates the patch if the same system created it.
Perhaps I have been made paranoid by Max Barry’s ‘Jennifer Government’ and the clever hidden payload plot?
But for many, it seems the idea of an AI God is a response to exactly the problem. It’s a way to stop running in circles trying to solve the logic. If you can’t trust trust, if verification is infinitely recursive, if every security layer is also an attack surface, the only logical exit from that maze is an entity that is:
- Perfectly aligned
- Perfectly transparent to itself
- Incorruptible by definition
- The final trust anchor that needs no anchor beneath it
That’s just god rebranded, and it is a comforting hug to the overthinking mind.
Leave a Reply