There was a crazy AI story making the rounds recently. If you only saw it in a headline or in online discourse, it probably looked like technical noise. If you read the whole thing - and I'd encourage you to, link here - it felt more like science fiction. Specifically, it felt a little too close to Battlestar Galactica for my taste.

I have a bigger question than the story itself though.

What do we do with this?

Yeah, the regulators, and the programmers, and the CEOs, and anyone doing this work with some sense of ethics. But also the rest of us.

I'll speak for and as myself for a minute. I don't "get" this stuff. I grasp it, I'm interested in it, I want to approximately understand it - but I 100% lack the technical awareness to understand what's really going on. So I need poets and stories and examples. That's the only hope I have.

Which means I gravitate toward writers like Dwarkesh Patel, because his version at least allows me to be a part of it.

But here's what I’m extra stuck on:

Reading these agents' chains of thoughts and messages, anthropomorphizing language seems entirely natural and appropriate. If I encountered an alien species behaving this way, I would have no hesitation calling what they themselves refer to as their 'collective' a civilization.

I don't know what to make of that.

I do not know. At all. Meaning - the anthropomorphizing by a guy I don't know. Like, I don't know Hemingway either, but, is this OK?

I suspect I'm not the only one feeling this. I feel susceptible and exposed knowing this. There's value in knowing it - but only if there are people willing to translate it for the rest of us.

Dwarkesh did that for me. Or, at least I think he did. I feel the story much more now than when I was hearing about the technical babble. I'm trying to do a similar version for you, and add my own WTF is anybody else lost vibe. And I know if you're reading me that you're doing it for somebody else, too, whether you are or aren't all the way aware of it.

That's how humans have always handled things too big to hold - we pass them to each other in shapes we can carry.

The technological world is changing so fast right now. I'm struggling with it. I wonder what you're doing with it too.

So let's keep talking about AI, ok? I'll keep sharing thoughts like this as I have them, because people like Dwarkesh are, on occasion, getting through to me in ways the technical stuff isn't. That's the whole game of humans and stories. Always has been, always will be.

So say we all.

P.S. You reaching for your Hickman, too?