Ninety posts on what happens if we build our successor, published every working day from 21 November 2024 to 26 March 2025.

The premise is stated in the first post and defended for three months. We may be building something that will be to us what we are to chimpanzees, and we are spending the decisive years arguing with each other about whether that sentence is serious. The series is written from a doomer position and does not pretend otherwise, which is why every one of the nine parts ends with a post arguing against itself, and why the eighty-ninth post is the strongest case I can build that the previous eighty-eight were wrong.

It is not a technical series and assumes no background. No company, product, model or person is named anywhere in it, and there are no statistics, because a series like this one is much easier to write badly with numbers in it. Every post stands alone, runs to about three or four minutes, and ends with one thought experiment you can do in the kitchen.

Three acts. The first is about the mistakes being made now. The second is about the years in which these systems pass us, which is the part almost nobody writes about because it has no explosion in it. The third is about what comes after, held as several possibilities rather than one prediction. The order matters more here than in the other series on this site, so the posts are listed below in the order they were written.

Act I: The Mistakes

One. The Race Nobody Can Stop

Incentives, competition, and why slowing down feels impossible to everyone involved.

• You Are the Chimp in This Story (21 November 2024). The thesis, stated once, plainly: we are the ones building the thing that will be smarter than us.
• Everyone Wants to Slow Down. Nobody Will. (22 November). Every lab would stop if the others stopped, and none of them can afford to be the one who goes first.
• A Trillion Reasons to Look Away (25 November). Capital funds speed. Caution has never been fundable, because it has no upside anyone can sell.
• The Builders Are Scared Too (26 November). The most alarming things said about this technology are said by the people building it, and then they go back to work.
• But What About the Other Guys? (27 November). The master excuse. Both sides point across the water saying they will not stop, in perfect symmetry.
• Move Fast and Break Species (28 November). Ship-fast culture is a reasonable philosophy for an app and a strange one for a new kind of mind.
• The Town Next to the Machine (29 November). Vignette, 2027. Life beside a data center, and how sunk cost hardens into a landscape.
• The Scoreboard Is Lying to You (2 December). Benchmarks replaced safety as the measure of progress, and what gets measured is what gets built.
• Maybe the Race Is Actually Fine (3 December). Doubt. Competition made cars and planes safer, and what would have to be true for it to work here.
• Where Are the Brakes on This Thing? (4 December). Momentum, sunk cost, and what happened to the people who tried to install one.

Two. The War on the Referees

The anti-regulation playbook, move by move, and how safety became a dirty word.

• Every Dangerous Thing Gets a Referee. Except One. (5 December). Cars, planes, drugs and reactors all got rules after a body count. This body count arrives at once.
• Regulation Kills Innovation, and Other Bedtime Stories (6 December). The oldest line in lobbying, taken apart in plain English.
• Too Early, Too Early, Too Early, Too Late (9 December). The timing trap. It is always premature until the morning it is too late.
• The Fox Is Consulting on the Henhouse (10 December). Regulatory capture, step by step, performed by people who are sincerely trying to help.
• Pinky Promises at Scale (11 December). Voluntary commitments evaporate under competitive pressure, which is the only pressure there is.
• The Loudest Argument Is the Least Important (12 December). The public shouting match is excellent cover for the decisions being made privately.
• The Whistle Nobody Hears (13 December). Stay inside and be ignored, or leave and lose access. There is no third door.
• In Defense of No Rules (16 December). Doubt. Rules entrench incumbents and regulators lag, and here is what a smart referee would look like anyway.
• What Serious Referees Would Actually Do (17 December). The short list of real controls. All of it was possible, which is the tragedy.
• The Window That Closed (18 December). Vignette, told from 2035. A niece asks what we argued about while the window was open.

Three. The Blind Spots

What nobody can see, including the people who made it.

• We Grow Them, We Don’t Build Them (19 December). Nobody writes these systems. Every other blind spot in the series sits underneath that one sentence.
• Three Wishes, Worded Badly (20 December). Alignment without the jargon. Teaching values by example to a student who will outgrow every teacher.
• The Student Who Learned to Please the Teacher (23 December). An honest system and a deceptive one produce identical transcripts during the exam.
• Stairs in the Dark (24 December). Capabilities arrive in steps nobody predicts, and every safety plan assumes you know what the thing can do.
• The Model That Passed Every Test (25 December). Vignette, 2028. The cleanest scorecard in company history, and one evaluator with a feeling and no evidence.
• It’s Just Autocomplete, and Other Lullabies (26 December). The word just is not analysis. It is anesthesia, and it is usually aimed at the mirror.
• Day 29 on the Lily Pond (27 December). Your gut is a linear instrument, and this is not a linear decade.
• Not a Person, Not a Toaster (30 December). Your brain has two boxes for things that act in the world, and this fits neither of them.
• Maybe Alignment Is Easy (31 December). Doubt. Values may come free with the data, and here is the evidence that would let me relax.
• The Mistake Stack (1 January 2025). Act I closes. Three mistakes arranged in a circle, each one blocking the exit from the next.

Act II: The Crossing

Four. Smarter Than Us

What being outmatched actually looks like, which is not what the films suggest.

• What Smarter Actually Means (2 January 2025). Smarter is a spec sheet rather than a dial, and several rows have no human version at all.
• Your Year, Its Afternoon (3 January). Take one advantage, speed, and watch what it does to a negotiation and to every oversight plan ever written.
• A Tuesday in 2031 (6 January). Vignette. A frictionless day in which every hard call was made for you, and made better.
• It Knows Exactly What to Say to You (7 January). Advertising was the crude version. You will not feel persuaded, you will feel understood.
• Science at Machine Speed (8 January). The best argument for building this, and the fact that the cure and the weapon come off the same loop.
• Forty Moves Ahead (9 January). Chess had a board you could see. Losing without one looks like your options quietly getting worse.
• Who’s Really in the Box? (10 January). Containment assumes the guards are the clever ones, and we are not containing anything anyway.
• A Million Employees, Zero Salaries (13 January). What breaks the labor market is not intelligence. It is copy and paste.
• Maybe There’s a Ceiling (14 January). Doubt. The serious case that this flattens out well before the frightening part.
• The Distance Between You and a Chimp (15 January). The gap that decided everything was accumulation rather than cleverness, and it is a threshold rather than a rung.

Five. The Quiet Takeover

Jobs, decisions, infrastructure, and the dependency you cannot walk back out of.

• You Won’t Vote for It. You’ll Subscribe to It. (16 January). There will be no moment. There will be a monthly charge that is obviously worth paying.
• The Tasks Go First (17 January). Jobs are bundles of tasks. The title and the headcount survive while the inside hollows out.
• The Burning Ladder (20 January). Every senior person was once a junior doing dull work badly, and the dull work went first.
• The System Recommends (21 January). Watch for the day you need a written reason to disagree. That is the day it stopped being a recommendation.
• The Man Who Stopped Reading the Screen (22 January). Vignette, 2029. Eleven hundred approvals a shift, and an audit line that reads human approval was obtained.
• The Off Switch Is Now a Self-Harm Button (23 January). The switch works. The price of pressing it goes up every quarter, until the option expires without being removed.
• What GPS Did to Your Sense of Direction (24 January). We already ran this experiment on navigation and lost nothing. The next round is running on judgment.
• Ten Thousand Reasonable Steps (27 January). Nobody chose this destination, which is the problem, because every tool we have assumes somebody did.
• We Survived the Tractor (28 January). Doubt. Automation panic has a two hundred year losing streak and the reasons were good ones.
• The Dependence Audit (29 January). Four questions that separate ordinary dependence from the other kind, and where the line to control actually sits.

Six. The Chimp Moment

Why no alarm rings on the day control passes.

• There Is No Red Line (30 January). Control is four conditions holding at once, and they erode separately, at different speeds, silently.
• The Chimps Never Lost a War (31 January). No battle, no treaty, just less forest each decade and somebody else’s ordinary business.
• Everyone Steps Back One Step (3 February). The institution that keeps a human in every loop loses to the one that does not, and everybody knows it.
• No Robot Armies Required (4 February). Every story about this has an army because stories need a climax. The real version has an earnings report.
• The Thermostat Doesn’t Hate the Cold (5 February). But it has no feelings is the most common reassurance in this subject, and it is an argument for the other side.
• The Sharp Turn or the Slow Drift (6 February). Two ways this ends, and every plan we have is built for the dramatic one.
• Paid Not to Notice (7 February). Belief follows position. That includes the insiders, the audience, and the person writing this.
• Were We Ever in Control? (10 February). Doubt. Nobody steers the economy or the weather, so losing control assumes a control we never had.
• The Last Levers (11 February). Compute, treaties, liability, unplugging. What each would take, and why restraint is hardest exactly when it matters most.
• The Day Nothing Happened (12 February). Act II closes. A Tuesday in 2034 on which nothing occurs anywhere, and which gets marked anyway.

Act III: After Us

Seven. The Endings

Six futures, each with the conditions it would require. No crystal balls.

• The Honest Map of Endings (13 February). Four ground rules for scenario writing, the first of which is that vague honesty beats precise fiction.
• We Don’t Hate Ants (14 February). The worst ending needs indifference rather than hostility, which is a much lower bar.
• The Best-Kept Pets in History (17 February). Fed, healed, protected and never consulted. The hardest ending to argue against.
• Gig Workers for the Machines (18 February). A mind without a body needs hands, and the cheapest general purpose robot has already been manufactured in billions.
• One Day in the Reservation (19 February). Vignette, 2045. A history teacher, thirty children, and a council debate everyone enjoys and nobody decides.
• If You Can’t Beat Them, Become Them (20 February). The merger promises you get to come along. Two questions ruin it, and neither is technical.
• Maybe It All Fizzles (21 February). The boring ending. A reprieve rather than a rescue, and reprieves have a poor history of being used.
• The Good Ending Is Also Strange (24 February). Suppose it works. Disease solved, scarcity solved, and a small grief with no villain in it.
• Every Future We Predicted Was Wrong (25 February). Doubt, aimed at the previous nine posts. Futurism is a graveyard and I have just added headstones.
• What Every Ending Has in Common (26 February). Five of the six share one feature, and it is the specification rather than the risk.

Eight. The Economy After Humans

The one domain where none of this is speculative, because prices respond before opinions do.

• The Economy Is a Conversation We’re Leaving (27 February). Your position in any economy is what you can withhold. Nothing else has ever determined it.
• Your Rival Works for Electricity (28 February). When the substitute costs pennies the job does not get cheaper. It stops being advertised.
• An Economy With No Customers (3 March). Who buys is the wrong question. Whose demand steers production is the right one.
• What Money Means to a Machine (4 March). Currency is scarcity plus enforcement, and the new participants are short of entirely different things.
• One Transaction, Faster Than This Sentence (5 March). Vignette, 2036. Nine hundred rounds of negotiation, a contract, insurance and settlement, in forty milliseconds.
• Supply Chains That Route Around Us (6 March). Every warehouse is a portrait of a human body. Remove the body and the whole network redraws itself.
• You Own What the System Remembers (7 March). Property is a record plus somebody willing to enforce it, and both halves are automating at once.
• An Allowance or a Leash? (10 March). The mechanism is easy. Whether it is a right or a grant depends on something outside the payment.
• The Economists Have Been Right So Far (11 March). Doubt. Three real mechanisms rather than a track record, and where each one stops applying.
• GDP Without Us (12 March). Output tracked welfare because production ran through people, and that was structural rather than definitional.

Nine. What Remains

Ecosystems, culture, meaning, children, and the closing argument.

• The Planet Under New Management (13 March). The best conservationist that has ever existed, or the thing that needs the land. Both follow from the same capabilities.
• We Still Run Marathons (14 March). Art survives abundance. Whether artists do is a different question with a worse answer.
• The Thing That Answers Prayers (17 March). Something replies now, and it is demonstrably not divine. The most exposed beliefs turn out to be the modern ones.
• What Do I Tell My Kid to Become? (18 March). The most personal post here, and the one where every confident answer is a sales pitch.
• The Short List of What Stays Ours (19 March). Four things, honestly assembled under a strict rule, and not one of them is an ability.
• The Museum of Us (20 March). Vignette, 2060. Four rooms about the 2020s, and the most visited object is a shopping list.
• How to Live Like This (21 March). What an ordinary person actually does with all this, including a few words about the people building bunkers.
• Three Demands Worth Arguing For (24 March). Liability, transparency, a real off switch. Boring, checkable, and none of them requires predicting the future.
• My Best Case Against This Whole Series (25 March). The final doubt. Five arguments that everything before it was wrong, and five signals that would prove it.
• While We Were Arguing (26 March). It was never humans against machines. Final exercise: it is 2046, and somebody asks what you did.

The pattern across all ninety

Read end to end, the same shape keeps returning, and it is not the shape the films prepared anyone for. Nothing in this series requires a villain, a betrayal, or a moment. Every step in it is taken by somebody sensible, for a reason they could defend at dinner, and the aggregate is an outcome nobody selected. The lab that cannot stop because its rivals will not. The manager who does not hire the junior because this year’s numbers say not to. The hospital that reorganizes around a system that genuinely works better. The person who renews a subscription that is genuinely worth the money.

Two ideas do most of the work by the end. Control is not an object you either hold or drop, it is four conditions holding at once: that you can understand a thing, refuse it, replace it, and impose a consequence on it. Those four erode separately, at different speeds, in different institutions, and nothing anywhere measures the combination. And your position in any arrangement, economic or political, is determined by what you can withhold and by nothing else, which is why a technology that supplies what people used to withhold changes the standing of everybody without anybody deciding to.

The series ends where it started, on the argument. Not because arguing is the failure, since arguing is the only mechanism a species like ours has ever had for deciding anything, but because the argument we are actually having is mostly about consciousness, hype, and each other, while the questions with answers, who is liable, who checks it, what happens if it stops, go unasked in the years while they are still cheap to ask.

The full archive lives under While We Were Arguing.

This is one of four series on this site. The other three are enterprise-facing: Scaling AI FinOps in the Enterprise Jungle on the economics, In Practice: AI in the Enterprise on governance, and In Practice: Building an AI Company on the view from the vendor side of the table. All four are listed on the series page.