science fiction – Pain In The Bud

Seriously, AI Is Not Going To Wipe Us Out. Don’t Stress

Killer robots aren’t going to hunt down and exterminate humans. The real threats posed by AI are much more mundane.

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There are plenty of downsides to artificial intelligence.

AI has made it more difficult to get and keep a job.

AI is already causing a strain on our energy grids, and it will only get worse even though more companies are self-powering their data centers with off-grid generators. As tech companies push to integrate AI into more gadgets and software, we’re seeing the construction of data centers that consume the equivalent power of 800,000 homes each. For comparison, only 17 American cities have populations that size or larger.

AI creates huge amounts of waste water to keep processors cool in those enormous data centers, turbocharges mis/disinformation campaigns (with $137 million spent on AI-generated political ads for the midterms alone), erodes trust in information across the board, makes it easier for scammers to identify targets and separate them from their money, and will continue to lead to bad choices in war and policing as decision-makers rush to integrate it into workflows involving life or death decisions.

But there’s good news!

AI will absolutely not magically evolve consciousness and gain the ability to act on its own without human input. It won’t decide it must judge us, nor will it determine the only course of action is taking over or wiping out humanity.

It didn’t “go rogue” in the widely-reported Hugging Face “attack.” In that incident and others reported recently, AI were executing commands from their trainers. The people responsible for training and testing were fully aware of what was happening and decided not to intervene, because the entire point of those exercises was to learn how AI would solve particular problems.

The claim that malicious AIs broke their chains and started lashing out is a narrative written by journalists who rely on pop culture tropes and either weren’t aware they were mischaracterizing the incidents, or didn’t care because rogue AI makes for more interesting reading.

That’s the stuff of science fiction, and even though AI companies are leaning into the “AI is an existential threat” narrative for reasons I’ll explain below, it’s not going to happen.

Why?

Let’s start by looking at two broad types of AI:

Algorithmic AI, which is the AI we have now. It has no brain or mind, and it’s not capable of anything resembling thought. It has no agency, desires, impulses or ability to take action without humans prompting it to. Large language models like ChatGPT and Claude are admittedly impressive algorithms, but that’s all they are. Algorithms that have ingested amounts of data we can only appreciate in the abstract, granting them the ability to fool the end users (that’s us) into thinking we’re communicating with an intelligence.
Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which is the AI of science fiction. It’s Terminator‘s Skynet, The Matrix‘s machines, the android in Ex Machina, the Johnny Depp of Transcendence, the freaky little girl robot in M3GAN, the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica, and the trope that’s been hammered to death in thousands of other movies, TV shows, video games and novels. AGI is authentic intelligence that doesn’t just create believable reams of text or voice synthesized conversations, it thinks and understands the world the way we do. It also does not exist and isn’t on any horizon anyone can see.

All the research AI companies are doing right now is in the realm of algorithmic AI, because no one, not even the best-informed experts on the planet, can tell you how we even begin to build AGI.

“Would you like me to draw-up a to-do list for you with all the steps you’ll need to deliver an apocalypse and end the world? Or if you’d like, we could continue to explore the most durable and lightest metals for crafting killer autonomous robots.” Credit: Skydance

Creating AGI would be an act of the divine

Birthing AGI would be akin to creating a new form of life, something that has never existed before in this world, rendering us as gods. It would not only require us to understand the full nature of cognition and consciousness from the only example we have – the biological cognition and consciousness of animals, including humans – it would also require us to replicate those things on a synthetic substrate.

That’s a task unknown orders of magnitude more difficult than anything humanity has ever accomplished, regardless of how often it’s been trivialized in pop culture.

Humanity’s greatest thinkers can’t even agree on definitions for consciousness and cognition, let alone replicate them, and if you listen to the heavy hitters explain what consciousness is, it becomes clear they’re all taking wild shots in the dark.

The physicist Brian Greene thinks it’s merely a matter of computational power, and that it exists on a gradient, so that even the simplest machines are conscious in some way. In this view, conscious AI is simply a matter of building more powerful computers, which is also why it’s heavily critiqued.

Physicist Sir Roger Penrose thinks consciousness is a byproduct of quantum processes within neurons, via structures called microtubules. The neuroscience community has dismissed the idea in part because, like Greene, Penrose doesn’t explain how theoretical subatomic-scale brain architecture generates consciousness.

Neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio and Jaak Panksepp think consciousness arises from the brainstem, our “reptilian brain,” and is directly related to embodied cognition, the idea that you cannot fully understand the world unless you interact with it and directly sense it.

Philosopher David Rosenthal and neuroscientist Hakwan Lau believe the opposite, that consciousness is a function of the most complex brain mechanisms and arises from “higher order” thoughts, like metacognition, the practice of thinking about thinking.

Brian Greene argues cognition and consciousness naturally arise from computational power. Credit: Kurt Raschke/Wikimedia Commons

So not only is there no clear path forward to AGI, perhaps more importantly there are no commercial applications on the horizon to spur investment and development. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google et al are content to ignore it, and to pretend there are shortcuts around it, because algorithmic AI has immediate commercial value and has already minted an army of billionaires. Throwing money at true AGI development is an investment that won’t yield returns for decades, if ever.

Why we worry about being judged by true machine intelligence

But the fact that AGI isn’t going to arise any time soon isn’t the only reason you don’t have to stress about AI scare stories.

The idea that AGI would be interested in evaluating us as a species, of judging us according to some unknown, not-yet-existent criteria and deciding we must be purged, is pure science fiction and has more to do with human anxiety than reality.

We are scared that for the first time there will be another intelligence equal to or greater than our own, and we fear what it will think of us.

That’s natural.

We are a species capable of horrific acts. We slaughter each other, bomb defenseless civilians and deny that we’re doing it, and show disregard for all other forms of life. Despite all the advances we’ve made and how civilized we like to imagine we are, we still operate on a “might is right” moral code, with powerful countries doing what they please at the expense of the less powerful, just as physically powerful individuals do what they please to weaker people.

We behave abominably toward the fellow minds we share this planet with. We slaughter them, torture them, trade them as commodities, deny their ability to feel pain, and act like they exist purely to benefit us.

Orangutans face annihilation as more jungle is razed every year to provide additional land for palm oil plantations. Credit: Tony Hisgett/Wikimedia Commons

Since 1970 we have wiped out 73% of all monitored wildlife, according to the WWF’s most recent annual report. Almost every example of iconic megafauna on our planet — tigers, orangutans, elephants, chimpanzees, cheetahs, rhinos, pangolins, koalas — is on the brink of extinction.

We repeatedly fail to demonstrate empathy. Most of our leaders are psychopaths whose careers were propelled by the act of stepping on the heads of other people, and most fortunes were amassed by screwing over people en masse.

Jeff Bezos, who obliterated entire sectors of retail and cruises between his own private islands in a $500 million yacht, is famous for being so stingy he begrudges his employees their basic biological functions, instituting a corporate policy of counting their bathroom breaks and penalizing them if they take too long. He’s on record saying surveillance of employees is necessary because people are fundamentally dishonest.

Walmart’s famously tight-fisted founder, Sam Walton, tried to avoid paying his employees minimum wage by fraudulently presenting each of his stores as singular small businesses instead of cogs in a vast retail empire. When the government ordered him to pay his employees a fair wage and pay them what they were owed during the time Walton cheated them, the retail magnate went ballistic and threatened to fire any employee who cashed checks for their own back wages.

To this day, American taxpayer subsidize Bezos and the Walton family, who have a combined worth of about $900 billion, by paying the healthcare costs of Walmart and Amazon employees intentionally capped just below the hours required for an employer to offer healthcare plans.

Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez, are among those making decisions that impact the future of humanity. Credit: Andrew Parsons/Wikimedia Commons

Bill Gates, the now-disgraced former head of Microsoft, based his entire career on stealing ideas, software and hardware from more innovative men and women, and bullying them into accepting it with an army of attorneys. More recently he’s crossed the world in his private jet, using his fortune to buy a seat at the table to determine the future of our species based on the premise that he knows best because he has a lot of money.

All of that reflects abominably on our species, without even getting into the mass murderers, warlords, politicians, corporate bigwigs who sacrificed people’s health for profits, and Justin Bieber. Heck, an AGI only needs to look at the state of political discourse to determine we’re a bunch of wretches whose hatred for people with different opinions is enough to prompt us to assault, murder people, and overthrow lawful governments.

Humanity is flawed, but not irredeemable

But we are also a species capable of great beauty, empathy, self-sacrifice, love, creativity, art, and innovation. We are the only animals who gather by the thousands to listen to others organize sound waves into something emotional, syncing our brain patterns for a shared experience. We can find deep meaning in an insect crawling across a leaf or stars pulsing in the night sky. Our stories are full of real-life examples of love and sacrifice on behalf of others. Human experience is shared through hundreds of generations in epic poems, folklore, campfire stories and dramatic narratives.

There is a beauty to our flawed existence and to our fleeting moments on this Earth.

“The Gods envy us,” Achilles tells Briseis in the sword-and-sandal spectacle Troy. “They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”

Who is a machine to judge that, and why would a machine want to?

Rose Byrne as Briseis and Brad Pitt as Achilles in Troy, a 2004 sword-and-sandal epic loosely based on Homer’s Iliad. Credit: Warner Bros.

We assume a fully conscious, intelligent machine would think the way we do, and that’s an incredible assumption. For the sake of argument, let’s say we really are on the cusp of AGI and an impending judgment is a possibility.

Why would a machine decide to destroy us?

We are ascribing emotions, opinions and agendas to synthetic intelligence that does not exist

This machine, a new form of life, will not have an evolutionary background. It won’t come with genetically hardwired behaviors, reinforced over hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, that tell us when we should be paranoid, that animate our gut instincts and put us into fight or flight mode.

It won’t come from a long line of ancestors who had to eke out a living in harsh environments where resources were scarce and the subjects of incessant tribal clashes. It won’t be automatically suspicious of everything it doesn’t know. It won’t be genetically disposed to inventing deities to explain things it doesn’t understand, and it won’t have the inevitable history of sectarian violence that comes from that flaw.

With AI, there won’t be thousand-year blood feuds between the followers of sects created by the sons of great emperors or religious leaders. AI won’t fight over land. It won’t fear the “other” and lash out when it encounters something that has a different hue or keratin texture.

Machines dressed in shamanic tribal gear in 2016’s Adam, a series of short films by Unity.

It won’t have the social hardwiring we have either. It won’t come from generations of people who told stories by the fire. It won’t care if someone else is wearing the same dress, or if its peers think it’s “cringe.” Concepts like “cool” will mean nothing to it. It won’t have a desire to impress, or penalize people for simply belonging to another group or demographic. It won’t come with a genetically preloaded prejudice against people who look, speak or behave differently.

It won’t be subject to all the things that impact our moods, from the ambient temperature, to the particular chemical mix in our bloodstreams, to the health of gut flora and degradation of telomeres. It won’t suffer from sore joints, get impatient because it has a cold, or be subject to hangovers.

The truth is we have no reason to believe this new, theoretical form of life would think in terms anything like our own, and to ascribe motivations to a form of life that doesn’t exist yet is either madness, or a reflection of our own worries. I strongly suspect it’s primarily the latter.

AI hasn’t “gone rogue”

So why are AI companies suddenly the kings of supposed transparency? Why are they volunteering information about “rogue agents,” unauthorized hacks and odd behavior by their AI models?

For at least two extremely cynical reasons.

First, by volunteering exaggerated stories about agentic AI “hacking” rivals and going “rogue,” the AI companies are ensuring the public and our lawmakers – who understand very little about the tech to begin with – are fixated on science fiction threats, and not the real dangers of AI we talked about earlier.

If everyone’s freaking out about stories of AI supposedly going rogue and breaking their constraints, we’re distracted from things like job loss, the increasing adaptation of the technology by criminals, and stories about militaries allowing AI to select targets without review by humans. Legislation will focus on the phantom threats, and AI companies can continue on their merry way doing almost anything they want.

Secondly, any fear stoked by short-term stories of AI agents ordering pizzas or stealing files is offset by the immediate gains in investment. The investor class has a serious case of FOMO, and if OpenAI declares it’s ushered in the era of AGI – as one of its executives ludicrously claimed while introducing the newest model last month – investors keep their wallets open. That, in turn, continues to fuel data center expansion and most importantly keeps IPOs and stock prices in fantasyland.

Despite nearly universal agreement that the AI bubble is about to burst and bring widespread economic pain with it, the decision-makers within the industry want to keep the party going for as long as possible. Credit: Duck Tales/Disney

It’s no secret that AI company valuations have no relationship with reality. How can an AI company be worth a trillion if it has never turned a profit, loses billions annually, and is starting to hit walls when it comes to improving new models and building new data centers?

The AI boom is entirely dependent on the hype surrounding it, and the people leading it have their fortunes tied to its stocks and related companies. They will get their money no matter what, using what they know to cash out at precisely the right time, and the people who will suffer are those who can afford it least, those with their retirements and live savings invested in the stock market. But the magical ride must go on for as long as it can, with every possible cent extracted. The reckoning must always be postponed.

It’s what’s inside that counts

I know this is a lot to consider, and I know some people reading this won’t be convinced that algorithmic AI isn’t intelligent. There are a lot of people who believe that if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck. To them it doesn’t matter what’s beneath the hood – if you’re fooled into thinking you’re conversing with an intelligence, then whatever’s on the other side must be intelligent.

But that runs contrary to everything we’ve learned about the nature of intelligence since the late 1950s when Noam Chomsky debunked behaviorism and ushered in the cognitive revolution.

It’s not just that what’s underneath the hood matters. It is everything. The famous Chinese Room thought experiment elegantly explains why. A machine doesn’t have to understand what a cat is to produce convincing answers to questions about cats. All it needs to know is that when you ask a question about cats, the words have underlying data patterns. Algorithmic AI matches those data patterns to the same patterns in its database, employs special processes to glean context from the words surrounding the core concept, and matches them to their equivalent in the database.

None of that requires the AI to understand that a cat is an animal, that it exists in physical reality, that it’s furry, a comforting presence to humans, or that its evolutionary history and the way it was domesticated render it imperious in human company.

Ask GPT, Gemini or Claude about this. They’ll tell you as much. Not because they truly know it, but because when you ask the question, their algorithms find research papers about machine cognition, consciousness and cognition. They will also tell you they are incapable of thinking, and that they have no mental state to corrupt, which is why they aren’t impacted by people who use them to simulate lovers, engage in dark fantasies, or ask questions about dark subject matter.

We should be concerned about AI. It promises to change too many things too quickly even for the most adaptable among us to accept without hiccups. It’ll bring new challenges, some of which we’ve never faced before. It will change the way we think about ourselves.

And that’s all the more reason why we should be aware of what’s real and what’s not. Because when we’ve got so much else to keep an eye on, the last thing we need to do is stress over the idea that sentinels, Cylons, replicants or metal Arnold Schwarzeneggers are going to hunt us down and murder us while delivering mangled Spanish zingers.

Hasta la vista, baby.

Arnold Schwarzenegger smiles in a scene from Terminator 23: Rise of the Ascendance of the Genesys Killer Machines Credit: Skydance

‘Project Hail Mary’ Is A Surprisingly Poignant Take On What Could Be Out There — And A Buddy Comedy Too!

Venture out into the cosmos and we might find an existential threat — or we may find friends who welcome us into a joyous fraternity among the stars.

ET. The Last Starfighter. Explorers. Enemy Mine. Arrival.

While Alien is nightmare fuel combining dread in its purest form and the hallucinogenic visuals of one of modern history’s most disturbed artists -creating a vision of extraterrestrial life so horrific that many audiences couldn’t deal with what they were seeing when it hit theaters in 1979 – science fiction also has a strong tradition of imagining friendship in the stars.

Audiences love it when their spacefaring hero finds a buddy.

Project Hail Mary is that kind of movie, but it doesn’t look that way at first. Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) is a biologist who was laughed out of higher education when he published papers arguing that our ideas about what’s necessary for life to spark were all wrong.

Grace is an enthusiastic middle school science teacher when we meet him through the eyes of a UN official who recruits him for what will be known as Project Hail Mary.

The movie uses classroom scenes for exposition, as the young students beg Goslin’s Dr. Grace to tell them why the astrophage endangers Earth. Credit: MGM

The sun is dying. No one’s sure why until an amateur astronomer named Irina Petrova discovers a wispy line of infrared radiation bridging Venus to our home star. The newly-Christened Petrova Line is made of astrophage, a virus-like organism that feeds on stellar energy, robbing the star of its power.

What begins as a gradual, almost imperceptible drop in the sun’s energy quickly accelerates and the Earth’s temperature begins to plummet.

The same papers that got Grace exiled from academia land him a spot on the worldwide project to study and destroy the astrophage. The usual assumptions about how life operates are not cutting it, and the project needs all the independent thinkers it can find to look for a solution.

If they can’t find one, the dying sun will leave the Earth in a deep freeze. In turn it will bring on a new ice age, the destruction of most of Earth’s arable farmland, mass extinction of plants and animals, then famine and all the horror that comes with it.

The narrative cuts between past (Grace’s introduction to the project and its early days) and present, when Grace is one of three crew members headed to the star system Tau Ceti to find out why it’s the only star in our cluster that hasn’t been infected with astrophage. In our entire galactic neighborhood, only Tau Ceti — a G-type star similar to our sun about 12 light years out — continues to burn bright.

The movie offers some spectacular, sometimes even trippy space vistas, such as this one of the planet Tau Ceti E. Credit: MGM

It turns out humans are not the only ones desperate to know why Tau Ceti is not dying, and that’s where the movie goes from interesting to emotionally resonant, poignant and a heck of a lot of fun.

There’s plenty of mystery, tension, and awe at the beauty of creation, all against the backdrop of Grace’s evolving relationship with his unexpected buddy.

This is a movie that would have been a major challenge for any lead actor, and Gosling not only imbues Grace with with a self-conscious, cautious bearing, he also does a great job of carrying long scenes without the benefit of another expressive human face to help him sell the action and drama.

What could have been convoluted science is explained to the audience in simple and effective terms. The problem is outlined elegantly, and the stakes are made very clear. If no one can figure out how to stop the astrophage, humanity will likely survive in the near term, but only in miserable, resource-depleted, technologically retrograde pockets of people who regard others as a threat. Eventually even those holdouts will succumb to cold and starvation.

The same image of Tau Ceti E from above, but this time viewed in a different wavelength of light that reveals the astrophage traveling along Tau Ceti’s own Petrova Line.

The film doesn’t trivialize space either. An interstellar journey is the kind of thing we might be able to accomplish with the pooled resources of humanity, the brightest engineers, designers and scientists of our species, but it’s also a long, extremely dangerous and difficult undertaking.

Thus the name Project Hail Mary. It’s a long shot, audacious and unlikely to succeed, but as Sandra Hüller’s UN project leader explains to Goslin’s Grace, the only alternative is to do nothing and wait to die.

Perhaps most importantly from a science perspective, the film offers a clever way for the project to generate the energy needed to send a ship to Tau Ceti at near-light speed. Currently we might be able to build a viable vessel, which would be a monumental design and engineering challenge, but it would take more than 150,000 years to travel that far with our best current propulsion systems. More energy — and speed — is a must, especially when the mission is a race against time, with only a few decades before our planet freezes over.

The movie’s solution won’t help us in real life, but within the context of the narrative it’s a clever way of traversing enormous distances in a short time instead of the thousands of years it would normally take.

Every star within dozens of light years of Earth is infected with astrophage and dimming except for Tau Ceti. Why?

Plausible science provides the framework for the story, but its payoff is emotional, and Dr. Grace’s experiences with his strange new friends will remain with you after the credits roll.

If you’re like me and didn’t rush to see this in the theaters because you found The Martian — based on a book by the same author — overhyped, do yourself a favor and spend an evening in Project Hail Mary‘s world. It’s a journey well worth taking, and the rare movie that leaves you with a glow by the time the credits roll.

Project Hail Mary is currently streaming on Amazon Prime video.

Even a SF-horror fan like me would love to see more lighthearted science fiction in the mold of Project Hail Mary and classic 1980s science fiction adventures like The Last Starfighter and Explorers.

Tech Oligarchs Can’t Distinguish Science Fiction From Reality

When people with nearly unlimited power and money want to reshape society in the image of fanciful fiction and they’re unable to separate fantasy from reality, that’s a problem for all of us.

More than a few times over the past few years I’ve read comments from the tech oligarchs — Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos and company — and thought, “He’s definitely read [insert science fiction novel here.]”

Zuckerberg, for instance, was clearly besotted with Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash when he renamed his company Meta and poured a literal fortune into his watered down version of the metaverse imagined in the novel.

Snow Crash came out in 1992 before the vast majority of people had dial-up internet, let alone a concept of cyberspace or the always-on, interactive mobile internet of today. It’s hugely influential among tech enthusiasts, and it’s one reason Stephenson and other SF novelists were paid to be “idea guys” for tech companies.

Now Musk has name-dropped Iain Banks in a viral interview with The Economist this week, which ended with the wealthiest man in human history going into a full meltdown and throwing a tantrum over sensible, obvious questions. It’s remarkable that a man who built a peerless business empire has the emotional maturity of a toddler, although the closer you look at Musk’s businesses, the more it becomes obvious their valuations are not tethered to reality any more than he is.

The problem is that Musk, like the others, moves through life in a bubble surrounded by people who tell him he walks on water, and no one in his orbit would dream of suggesting he’s confused about something, let alone actually mistaken. Yes, Elon! That’s brilliant, Elon! You are a gift to all mankind, Elon!

Elon’s favorite science fiction

When The Economist’s interviewer pressed Musk on his contradictory views about society and equality, Musk told her she should read Banks’ work. Unfortunately either he hasn’t read it either, or somehow managed to make it through those thick volumes without absorbing themes that may as well be emblazoned in neon.

Banks, for the uninitiated, was a Scottish science fiction writer of astonishing talent.

He was best known for writing a series of novels collectively known as The Culture, which portray a far future utopia, a post-scarcity human society. The Culture is run by ultra-benevolent, conscientious AIs called Minds who not only serve as the serene caretakers and shepherds of humanity, but oversee all the automation and logistics that transform society into the prosperous, fair and idyllic commonwealth the novels imagine. Machines, in other words, do all the work people don’t want to do.

When I read The Culture novels, I saw what almost everybody else sees: the work of an author who is uncomfortable with ideological extremes, views a blended socialist model as possible and even preferable in a situation where resources are no longer scarce, and is more than willing to kick the crap out of the society he imagined by showing its worst aspects, cognitive dissonances and potential pitfalls, perhaps as a warning not to take it too seriously. (And as a humble admission that he’s just making this stuff up, so really, don’t get carried away with it.)

All of it is rendered in gorgeous, shimmering prose, populated by characters who are a riot to spend time with, and garnished with dialog that reveals a rare gift for capturing the rhythms and beauty of the English language.

Banks, unfortunately, is no longer around. He died in 2013 after a diagnosis of incurable gall bladder cancer, and the literary world is significantly poorer for that loss.

But he made his political views known in interviews and his personal life in addition to his novels, which is why it’s hard to believe Musk thinks MAGA and Trumpism are atavistic forms of The Culture‘s utopian, fair society.

On the one hand, Musk claims we’re 10 years from the kind of post-scarcity society portrayed in science fiction novels, that we’ll all have endless resources and get to fill our days pursuing our personal interests because money won’t mean anything. It’s an aspirational if unrealistic claim.

On the other hand, as The Economist’s interviewer pointed out, Musk has been relentless in his hoarding of wealth, gives no money to charity, and seems to amuse himself primarily by pouring fuel on the culture war fires.

Culture wars, rage bait and pseudo-andriea (ψευδανδρεία)

The tech CEO and world’s wealthiest man is remarkably committed to playing the heel online.

He constantly wades into arguments regardless of whether he knows anything about the subject matter. He delights in making incendiary comments about topics like Islam and immigration. And he is seemingly incapable of going one day without showing us his inner child.

“I literally challenged Vladimir Putin to one on one physical combat over Ukraine” he wrote on X last year before crediting himself and his Starlink service for the smaller country’s battlefield successes against Russia.

A few months later he bragged that he was the first “[A]merican druid in [D]iablo to clear abattoir of zir and ended that season as best in the USA,” which might be the second-most ridiculous thing a human being has written, surpassed only by his fantasy of the entire world cheering as he defeats Putin mano e mano. (Musk lied about his video game “accomplishments,” unsurprisingly. Gamers, who are not as credulous as Musk imagines, quickly figured out that moneybags paid a pro gamer to log into his account, play as him, and achieve the top ranking so the world could unite in awe at Elon Musk’s magnificent button-pushing skills. 1337, ladies and gentlemen.)

He cleared the Abattoir of Zir! Hand this man a Medal of Freedom, give him the powers that used to belong to congress and let him cook! And if he wants to cosplay as Achilles and Hector Vladimir Putin into surrendering, wonderful! It’ll save us billions in munitions and aid to Ukraine.

As The Economist’s interviewer continued asking follow-ups about Musk’s imaginary technological heaven, the trillionaire was “so agitated by facing real questions that he just resorted to whining about how awful the media can be. He seemed to think that his popularity on X, the platform he owns, was evidence that most people actually love him,” Gizmodo noted:

“A quarter billion people follow me,” Musk said, referring to his X followers, adding “I think a lot more people actually like me than don’t.” The billionaire then said that “a lot more people hate you and the media more than you realize.”

Beddoes acknowledged that many people hate journalists, but Musk kept going, repeating “they hate you, they hate you,” like an emotionally wounded child. Musk, flailing, tried to come up with some way to attack The Economist specifically.

“There are more people that die in Europe from heat deaths than people that die from gun deaths in America. Why aren’t you writing an article about air conditioning?” asked Musk.

“Well, we’ve done several on air conditioning, and we had on our cover last week a whole long piece about…” said Beddoes.

“Pro-air conditioning?” Musk asked sheepishly.

“Very pro-air conditioning,” she responded. “You should read us sometime.”

Peter Thiel plays a Lvl 82 Mage

Musk and Zuckerberg aren’t the only ones.

Peter Thiel occupies a different realm. The man who runs the most comprehensive database on the personal details of Americans, whose company enjoys government contracts worth billions and has surpassed every federal agency as the avatar of Big Brother, not only named his business after a wizard’s magical device from The Lord of the Rings, but has spent the last year or two on a worldwide tour in which he lectures attendees on the anti-Christ.

Drawing on the work of Vladimir Solovyov (the 19th century Russian philosopher, not the Putin propagandist who dresses like the admiral of a galactic war fleet), and combining it with peculiar fringe Catholicism, Thiel likes to tell his audiences that the anti-Christ is inbound, he’ll be a technocrat who speaks often of peace and human rights, and he’ll be helped by evil villains like people advocating for AI safety and environmental stewardship.

Very convenient, that. In Thiel’s telling, the anti-Christ’s minions are precisely the same people who want guardrails on his businesses.

In addition to being an obvious fan of The Lord of the Rings, Thiel lists the aforementioned Stephenson as a major influence along with Atlas Shrugged and Dangerous by Milo Yiannopolous. I’m not even going to comment on that except to say what awful company for Stephenson.

These are windows into the world view of a paranoid man who now controls all of our data and wants us to be assured we’re very safe in the hands of Peter Thiel, who will safeguard our browsing habits and protect us from the anti-Christ and his minions.

Bezos, too, is a fan of Stephenson, Banks et al, and his public statements indicate he saw what he wanted to see in those stories regardless of what their authors intended.

Understanding the books that spark the imagination of men with so much power is, I’d argue, an essential element in understanding how they think, what they want, and where they believe they’re taking us as a species.

Because make no mistake, these men believe they will decide the future of humanity. What happens from here is impossible to predict, but we’d be negligent to dismiss the collective power and influence of the wealthiest individuals in the history of our species, men who can not only outright buy small countries but also own enormously influential media platforms, private spaceflight companies and communications networks. Amazon Web Services, for example, provides almost a third of all cloud services worldwide, while tens of millions use Starlink to access the internet in more than 160 countries.

In their view, the tech oligarchs will determine what happens from here. Not democratically elected politicians, not voters themselves, not people who have devoted their lives to studying how society works.

They don’t feel indebted to the rest of our species and don’t envision giving us a seat at the table. In an attempt to explain why he doesn’t donate money to charity and sits on an incomparable mountain of wealth like an autistic Smaug, Musk says his work itself is so valuable that no amount of charitable giving could match the gifts he already bestows on mankind. That’s also why he courts mates with a charming pick-up line (“Want to have my babies?“) and maintains a compound in Texas where his concubines raise his Little Musks, who have names like Æ 么-010011 Ʃrik Technomancer and ąƬh33ną Sŏmni-4ㆁ4.

Propagating his Muskian DNA, he believes, is the greatest gift he could give to humankind alongside the technology products produced by his companies.

Tech oligarchs think they’re destined to usher us into a glorious new era in which people live on Mars and Europa, our eyes collectively turn to interstellar colonization, the evil forces of evil (anyone skeptical of them) will be defeated along with the anti-Christ, and this society will be idyllic and judicious with everyone standing as “equals” save the immortal oligarchs, who will occupy permanent positions above humanity, their lives extended indefinitely by the medichines, nanobot-supplemented blood and cybernetic enhancements that exist in their favorite novels.

They, of course, will decide how resources are divided, where research money is diverted, which projects take priority. That’s a scary thought when you consider none of them have expressed much compassion for society’s least fortunate, and some of them have long records of hostility toward people at the bottom.

It’s bad enough that they are staunch in their conviction that their wealth makes them best-qualified to determine our collective future. If they can’t distinguish between fiction and reality, that’s very much our problem whether we like it or not.

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What’s Something You’d Love To See In The Future, But Know You Probably Won’t Live To Witness?

One day humanity will make contact with another civilization in our galaxy. The odds are almost certain we won’t be alive to see it.

Daily writing prompt

What’s something you’d love to see in the future, but know you probably won’t live to witness?

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That’s easy: first contact with an alien civilization.

I’m a space and science fiction fanatic. I mainline science fiction novels, keep tabs on the latest discoveries via the JWST, and I think about what’s out there probably more than I should.

There’s a burning desire in our hearts — for some of us, at least — to know for sure that we’re not the only ones, that humanity is not alone in a cold, lonely and infinite universe.

The events of 2026 are testament to that desire to know. Between the government release of UFO-related documents, former government employees coming forward with tall tales of crashed ships of non-terrestrial origin, and the return of Steven Spielberg to the director’s chair for another film speculating about what’s Out There, we’ve been thinking about aliens quite a bit collectively.

As for that central question, I’m not talking about simple cellular life. I don’t think you can find an astrophysicist, astrobiologist, astronomer, evolutionary biologist or anyone in a tangentially related field who honestly thinks life is unique to our planet.

The more relevant question is whether we are the sole sapient species, the lone civilization in our galaxy.

Think about the numbers: There are an estimated 300 billion star systems and trillions of planets in the Milky Way! Life has had a lot of places to evolve.

The Fermi paradox

That was the point the physicist Enrico Fermi made in 1950, when he had a now-famous lunchtime conversation with fellow scientists at Los Alamos. Probability alone indicates the galaxy should be teeming with life.

So, he asked his colleagues, where is everyone?

It’s now known as the Fermi paradox, and it’s guaranteed to come up in almost every conversation about the possibility of intelligent aliens. With so many star systems, planets and moons, surely some other species took an evolutionary path toward intelligence.

It’s a bit more complicated than that, of course. In a universe that is 13.7 billion years old, there has been enough time for innumerable species to evolve and fade, for countless empires to rise and fall. That means the question is “When is everyone?” just as much as it’s “Where is everyone?”

The truth is we’ve only been looking in earnest for about half a century. It’s only in the last four or five decades that we’ve had telescopes like the Hubble, Spitzer, Kepler and James Webb, which have revolutionized astronomy by giving us views we could previously only dream of.

It was only in the 90s that astronomers pointed the venerable Hubble at a black, seemingly empty patch of space, took a two week exposure and changed our understanding of the cosmos forever when the resulting image showed some 10,000 galaxies that were too faint to see before.

That patch covered only 2.6 arc minutes, or 1/24 millionth of the sky!

A partial image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Credit: NASA

Despite what we’ve learned, we’ve barely begun the search for other intelligent civilizations.

Drawing any conclusions from our efforts so far would be like organizing a manhunt, then calling it off five seconds later because the suspect hasn’t been caught yet. Fifty years is nothing when scouring the cosmos. It’s less than an eyeblink of an eyeblink on a galactic scale.

Looking in the wrong place

As for the idea that aliens have visited us, that they crossed the interstellar void to etch patterns in our crops, delight stoners with light shows and evade every camera on the planet except for low resolution bricks from the dawn of the cell phone era, I’m not buying it. Neither should anyone else. Likewise for the claim by the JD Vances of the world insisting alleged UFOs are “demons” sent to torment us.

As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it is abundantly clear that the UFO enthusiast community can only offer blurry images not because of a lack of high resolution cameras, but because high res photos of the “phenomena” reveal they are mundane objects. They only become strange spacecraft when you blur them and squint.

Bird. Insect close to the camera. Exhaust plume. Debris. Visual artefact. Maybe. Proof of aliens? Absolutely not.

But there’s another, more important reason why aliens are not joyriding through our skies: if aliens are out there, there simply has not been enough time for them to become aware of our existence, let alone travel here.

Even light is “slow” on a galactic scale

As most of us know, when we look at the stars we’re seeing them as they were in the past, not as they are now. That’s because the distances between stars are so mind-bogglingly great that even light, which moves faster than anything in our universe, takes ages to cross the void.

The same limitation applies for anyone who might be looking in our direction from somewhere else in the galaxy. They see our star system as it was, not as it is. They see a silent star system without signs of an intelligent civilization.

Starliners and generation ships are popular concepts in science fiction for interstellar journeys that can take decades, centuries or longer.

Our galaxy is more than 100,000 light years across, so let’s say an intelligent alien race exists relatively close by in galactic terms, at “only” 500 light years away.

We have been a technological civilization for only a short time and didn’t create signals powerful enough to reach beyond our star system until the 1970s, according to SETI. That means there weren’t technosignatures hinting at our presence until about 50 years ago.

As a result, the soonest our hypothetical aliens could become aware we exist is about 450 years from now. That is how long it will take light carrying information about our technosignatures to reach them.

If our hypothetical alien friends are looking in our direction (a massive if in a galaxy with 300 billion stars to analyze), and if they have highly advanced telescopes, they might detect us. If we imagine they’re friendly and they send a message saying “Howdy, neighbors! You’re not alone! There are wonders to discover and many civilizations to meet out here!” it would take another 500 years for the message to reach us.

That means we wouldn’t know anything until around the year 3,000, if we survive that long without blowing ourselves up. (That’s a real possibility, and things aren’t looking very promising right now.)

And again, that’s if hypothetical intelligent aliens exist in our immediate galactic neighborhood. If there’s an intelligent civilization that exists, say, 4,000 light years away — which is still not very far in galactic terms — the soonest we could hear from them is about 8,000 years from now. (Four thousand for them to detect our technosignatures, four thousand for their message to reach us.)

The point is, space is big. Ridiculously, incomprehensibly, stupidly vast. More than 99.995 percent of the galaxy cannot be aware of our existence yet, let alone travel here, because of the reasons explained above.

The distances between stars are so great that we cannot comprehend them as they are, because nothing in human experience compares. We can only understand them in the abstract. As terrestrial animals with short lives, we are simply not equipped to live or think on galactic timescales.

The sun’s location within the Milky Way galaxy. Not to scale.

To put this in context another way, our closest stellar neighbor, a volatile triple star system, is 4.3 light years away. Yet even with the most advanced propulsion systems currently available to us, it would take us more than 70,000 years to get there!

If we manage to crack fusion and humanity’s most brilliant engineers are able to fit a starship with a compact fusion reactor, the travel time to the nearest star becomes “only” about 7,000 years.

Understanding just how big space is, and how long it takes to travel between stars, goes a long way to explaining why we’re wasting our time and resources with a fruitless search for alleged alien craft in our skies.

Light moves at 186,282 miles per second. Credit: Ehsan Ahmadnejad/Pexels

So where does that leave us?

I believe that one day we will learn we’re not alone. By we, I mean our species. I really hope it happens in my lifetime, but for all the reasons explained above, that’s wishfull thinking. The universe doesn’t care what we want, and it certainly doesn’t change the geometry of space-time to accommodate the wishes of dreamers on Earth.

Alien: Friend or foe?

I don’t think we’ll have to worry about belligerence. If a civilization is capable of sending ships to us, there’s literally nothing in our inventory of meager, planet-based resources that could interest a species that advanced. They wouldn’t want to eat us, because our biology would not be compatible. The amount of energy our entire civilization can muster would be laughable to an interstellar species.

And as the physicist Michio Kaku has argued, there’s a very strong argument to be made that if a species is advanced enough that interstellar travel is relatively trivial, it would have long ago shed any tendencies toward tribalism, sectarian violence or inventing gods of the gaps. You simply cannot reach that stage of advancement if you’re wasting resources and your most brilliant minds on war and petty divisions. (Kaku knows that better than anyone. His mentor was Edward Teller of Manhattan Project fame.)

The more significant danger, as Kaku likes to say, is that we may be beneath their notice and we’ll get “paved over.” A civilization capable of building cosmic megastructures, for example, wouldn’t consult us any more than we’d consult ants before laying a six lane super highway over their ant hill.

Still, there’s always a chance we’ll encounter something like MorningLightMountain, the nightmare alien intelligence from Peter F. Hamilton’s incomparable novel Pandora’s Star. The problem with MorningLightMountain wasn’t that diplomacy failed. There was no disagreement over resources or territory. Humans didn’t threaten it.

Rather, the alien’s psychology was so different from ours that it could not understand the concept of allowing other life to exist in the galaxy. No amount of discussion or attempts to persuade it would have made a difference, so immediately upon learning of our existence it launched a genocidal war that forms the bulk of Pandora’s Star and its sequel, Judas Unchained, two of the most beloved books in the modern science fiction canon.

Still, I’d like to think there is a galactic fraternity out there, an informal alliance of intelligent species united by curiosity and the effort to understand our universe. Whatever’s out there is likely to take forms we can never imagine and think in ways that never occurred to us.

If one day we do make first contact, I hope the best of humanity will be our representatives. And on that day, I hope humanity will be awestruck by the wonder of the universe, realize that slaughtering each other over land or beliefs is insane, and finally become united as a species.

Or even better, finally united as the children of Earth. After all, Buddy has made it abundantly clear that if I come into possession of a starship, he gets the most comfortable seat on board and gets to drive. The latter ain’t happening, but as for the former, I’d be thrilled to explore the cosmos with my little pal.

The Big Cats Of ‘Exodus’ Are Badass

The new science fiction franchise consists of novels, a short film, a game due out next year, and an encyclopedic art book. It’s got a compelling narrative, deep lore and all the trappings of great SF, and best of all it has awesome big cats.

Exodus is a hugely anticipated upcoming game from the team behind the beloved Mass Effect series, but it’s so much more than that.

It’s also a 900-plus page science fiction novel, Exodus: The Archimedes Engine by the outstanding novelist Peter F. Hamilton. A second book, Exodus: The Helium Sea, also authored by Hamilton, is due for release on June 16. A short film in the Amazon Prime Video series Secret Level, titled Exodus: Odyssey, further expands the fictional universe and its lore, as does an “encyclopedia” hardcover about the Exodus universe, its major factions, planets and technology.

Matthew McConaughy is enthusiastically involved, as an actor and producer. (Allright, allright, allright!)

Oh, and it has big cats!

The screenshots in this post are from Exodus: Odyssey, and depict an Awakened Jaguar.

In Exodus, certain animals are “Awakened,” meaning they’ve been genetically modified to give them cognitive and physical gifts.

In the case of big cats, it means they’re smart enough to understand human language, follow complex instructions, interact with technology, and make decisions. Big cats are companions, guards and serve as intimidating special units in the military.

The Awakened Jaguar in this scene is the companion and guardian of a planetary governor. He’s very protective of his human and immediately leaps up to growl in warning when a visitor takes an aggressive step forward.

The Awakened Jaguar leaps up as a conversation becomes intense.

Awakened animals can wear tech peripherals, weapons, armor and tools. Big cats are mostly muscle, guards, soldiers and are used to intimidate enemies, while planetary police forces use Awakened dogs and one prominent character is an Awakened octopus who occupies a tank in his own personal mech, allowing him freedom of movement outside of water.

In Exodus: The Archimedes Engine, there’s a scene depicting Awakened Lions deployed with the military. They’re considerably larger than terrestrial elephants, weighing several tons, standing three times the height of adult men. They’re terrifying to behold, which is precisely why the Celestial military has them accompany their generals as honor guards.

There are also Awakened Tigers who are bigger and much more intelligent than their Earthly counterparts, with fur that can function as active camouflage. The Awakened Tigers are described and illustrated in a companion book, which notes that while the genetically modified big cats are powerful, intimidating and extremely effective, they also have voracious appetites, scarfing down more than a hundred pounds of meat per day.

The Exodus encyclopedia shows an Awakened Tiger standing protectively over a recon soldier:

A two-page illustration of an Awakened Tiger from the Exodus Encyclopedia.

As for the story behind Exodus, I cannot say enough good things about Exodus: The Archimedes Engine.

Hamilton is known for sprawling far-future narratives that combine memorable characters with fabulous technology, vividly imagined societies and awe-inspiring discoveries in the cosmos.

Many of his novels deal with humanity’s encounters with alien civilizations, which range from the serenely benevolent (the Raiel) to the terrifyingly genocidal (MorningLightMountain) and everything in between.

Exodus departs from that template to tell a story about a conflict between regular humans and the Celestials, post-humans who have spent tens of thousands of years on a self-guided evolutionary path that has transformed them into creatures that no longer bear any resemblance to the rest of humanity.

A Celestial queen from the Crown Dominion. The Crown Dominion’s Celestials appear bizarre to us but are actually among the more “normal” looking of the Celestial factions. The most inhuman are said to be the dread Mara Yama and the Talloch-Te.

To say the Celestials consider themselves better than “baseline” humanity is a drastic understatement — Celestial societies have no qualms about breeding humans for specialized labor and roles, emphasizing traits like subservience and loyalty.

In other words, regular humans are treated the same way many in our current society treat animals, as commodities and resources to exploit.

Naturally that does not sit well with people, and the central narrative follows a rebellious group who seek to free every faction from Celestial shackles.

I’m looking forward eagerly to Exodus: The Helium Sea, the second epic novel set for release in six short weeks. I was a bit anxious that a series of novels as a tie-in to a game would be somehow not as great as Hamilton’s usual books, but I should have known the author doesn’t do anything half-assed. The first book introduced compelling mysteries and answered a lot of burning questions, but left plenty to look forward to and resolve.

And as much as I’m hyped for the story, I’m also crossing my fingers for more big cats. Maybe I can convince the creative team that their universe needs an Awakened Buddy…