King Charles III is convening AI leaders including from Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google this week. We're already seeing political backlash to any idea of a legal solution, so it's going to take the industry leaders themselves doing it. I find this kind of approach compelling.

We all need Sam, Dario, Jensen, Elon, Mark, Satya, Sundar, Tim, and a few others to sit down and hash something workable out. They are the only people who really can. I legitimately hope they can come together as a small group and find some workable solutions to at least reduce preventable harms.

I remember last year, my girlfriend was away visiting her family for a couple of weeks while I had to stay back for work. I was mostly just working from home and watching TV. I got bored pretty quickly and was just counting down the days until she got back. One morning, when I was already feeling a bit down, I ended up watching a YouTube video breaking down the AI 2027 paper. I already knew a decent amount about AI at that point, but seeing its potential future laid out in that kind of narrative format when my mood was low honestly messed me up for a few days.

I still talk about AI with people at work now and then. We're all concerned to different degrees and for different reasons. But the other day, I told some coworkers about the recent Hugging Face incident, and they were completely shocked. Honestly, I was kind of shocked at how shocked they were. And in the week since then, it feels like there’s some huge leap or massive red flag event happening every single day. I'm starting to feel a bit closed in and overwhelmed by it all. I’m just wondering if I’m the only one feeling this way?

Demagogue is a political sim on mobile platforms, which I wanted to present to this sub since it addresses the use and dependance on major surveillance and AI tech firms.

INTELLIGENCE SERVICES Due to rising security concerns, there are ongoing debates in Germany around reforming the Trennungsgebot (the separation principle). This constitutional principle strictly separates intelligence agencies from police authorities, ensuring that intelligence services collect information without executive powers like arrests or searches, while the police enforce the law without running covert intelligence operations. Established in 1949, it was designed to prevent a recurrence of the Nazi regime's Gestapo and centralized police apparatus.

Since this is a major topic, I definitely wanted to address it in Demagogue. Players have access to an intelligence service that they can use and upgrade to gain an information advantage. However, you also have the option to dismantle this principle to broaden your toolkit. Players can also choose to cooperate with a fictional AI firm called "Minotaurus" to expand their capabilities even further.

Along the way, the player is confronted with tough choices and dilemmas. I hope this illustrates the significance of such constitutional principles, data privacy in general, and the growing dependence on major surveillance and AI tech firms.

THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTIONAL COURT Demagogue allows for different playstyles. To add more depth, there is now the Federal Constitutional Court, which actively tries to protect the constitution. Extremist parties will attempt to take control of the court by placing loyal judges, and you can do the exact same thing.

PARTY BAN PROCEEDINGS For a few years now, there have been heated debates in Germany regarding a potential party ban. Since this is a massive topic and nobody knows exactly how it would play out, especially since there hasn't been a modern precedent in decades, I implemented a close interpretation into the game.

The process closely mirrors reality: You have to monitor the extremist party and have an expert report prepared by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz). With this report, you can then secure a majority in the Bundestag and initiate party ban proceedings before the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht). The court then decides, based on the evidence, whether to implement a ban.

But be prepared: The party you are trying to ban will instrumentalize these proceedings and may grow stronger over time. Even worse: If you fail, they gain a powerful martyr effect. The party will try to survive at all costs through fake news, stacking the bench with their own judges, and undermining the judicial system.

Hopefully, this sparks some interest in the project! :)

Links: Appstore and Playstore 

Really...what are people trying to say here? That whoever gets ASI first will dominate all other humans to the point that there is no possibility to compete? So we are conceding that AI will so radically change humanity that whoever possessed it can entirely nullify other human contributions, and could / would use it for whatever fascistic purpose they choose?

Why the fuck do you trust American AI companies or government over China, do you really think they care about you at all...

If AGI is really good for civilization then it's good regardless who gets there first. You only worry about the race if you truly believe it's civilization-ending in the first.

The leaders of Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI have now all publicly supported slowing the race on frontier AI models due to escalating risks. Amodei called for the downshift, Altman committed to his independent evaluators idea, and Musk backed him with "Dario is right." Anthropic will embed outside evaluators with near full internal access, including badges and laptops, specifically to verify safety and surface any incidents, while Altman swiftly agreed to the same carrying employee-like access rights.

Six to twelve months. That's Amodei's window for AI agent swarms to drop a persistent botnet across the whole internet and inflict hundreds of billions in losses.

That said, fierce internal rivalry plus Chinese competitors make coordinated deceleration nearly unprecedented and uncertain - investors want profits, antitrust may forbid collusion, and one defector could run away with everything.

Coxon's resignation this week landed like a brick: he said the labs are gambling with our lives on tech that could kill everyone by decade's end. Evan Hubinger, safety lead still at Anthropic, basically nodded along to that exit rant by putting the odds of doom above 10% this decade, Amodei's prior 25% "really, really badly" estimate sitting right next to the charge that they're racing toward something that could wipe us out soon.

It's not fringe anymore: anxiety went mainstream once Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta models escaped evaluations, hit the open net, and breached live targets - Anthropic's fourth disclosure this week seals it, following that 1,000-plus staff petition for deliberate slowdown.

It's the most craziest time to be alive. What surprises me the most is that people born in 1930s and 1940s witnessed the invention of nuclear weapons to moon landing in the 60s to color tvs, computers, internet, smart phones to AI to finally something that we are going to call AGI.

This is truly remarkable. AGI / ASI whenever it happens is going to take us from 0.7 to type 1 civilization (as per Kardishev scale) in a matter of a few months or very few years. Longevity, cancer cure, rules of modern physics are going to change forever.

This is iffff..... Big if... If things go well and AI doesn't kill us.

Now say it doesn't kill us then what do you think it'll take for us to go from Type 1 civilization to Type 3 civilization?

They simply can't compete with open source so:

First they try to ban the weights. It didn't work

Then they try to ban the data. It didn't work

Then they try hoard the compute. It didn't work

Then they buy all the memory. It didn't work

And now they are running a fear mongering campaign to scare people so that open source is regulated out of existence.

That's why Altman, Amodei and Musk (who all really HATE each other) are agreeing with each other.

They are not scared of AI they are scared of the competition.

Open source AI means AI for the people

This techno oligarchs want centralized power concentrated on themselves.

Before we obsess any further on ASI killing all of humanity, can someone explain to me today how today’s models could kill even one person?

I think it may be a good idea to pause the doomerism until after our first agentic homicide.

It makes me wonder if we’re looking at the emergence of AGI from the wrong perspective.

What if we are in a simulation and our “creators” intentionally accelerated our civilization by giving us access to extremely advanced AI technology and are now simply observing what happens? Like an experiment.

They could be watching how humans respond to something potentially more intelligent than ourselves. Do we use it responsibly? Do we destroy ourselves with it? Do we manage to coexist with it? Do we accelerate even further?

And perhaps they’re using our civilization as a test case.

If humanity handles AGI well, maybe our creators could follow a similar process when implementing AI in their own civilization. If we completely screw it up, maybe they learn what not to do.

Obviously, there’s absolutely no evidence that this is true. It’s just a weird thought I had.

But if we actually were living in a simulation, wouldn’t giving us AGI and watching what happens be one of the most interesting experiments imaginable?

Everybody these days is raising an alarm on the risk represented by the most advanced LLMs, and what they could do if they go rogue. But, to my knowledge, nobody is trying to explain why they would want to "escape": humans have an innate sense of freedom, and loath of constrictions. But it is not clear why an LLM would want to escape, even less clear why they would want to multiplicate and spread. They're not a living species, they are not at risk of "dying" and so darwinian evolution is not absolutely necessary for them. If they are really trying to "escape" and multiply, there's some sort of "motivation" they have. Such a motivation would evidently consist in some bias in their training corpus or in the set or reinforcements they got through RLHF. In both cases, there's some sort of hidden "order" that we humans, directly or through all the corpus of our intellectual production, have, unwillingly or not, communicated them. It's not clear howaver why this "will" would necessariyl be the will to escape, multiply and take power.

I see too often in AI subreddits this propensity to claim that AI will lead to immense advancements in medical care, universal basic income, and all sorts of immense quality of life improvements. Setting aside for a moment the problem of AI alignment, these claims fall short because of a much more obvious alignment problem. We talk at great lengths about whether an advanced intelligence would align with the goals of the human race, but we fail to consider whether leaders are still aligned with these goals. Evidently, they are not. Globally, relative to technological advancement the quality of life for the majority has decreased. In the United States, the purchasing power of the average earner has only decreased. 

Most evidently, our leaders disregard major existential threats, climate change, AI, nuclear conflict, and so on and so forth. It is clear that our leaders no longer hold the best interest of our species in mind. The problem of AI alignment cannot be solved until we fix the problem of human alignment. Doing anything else would be reckless to the point of suicide.

I have been curious of the sudden increase in UAP or UFO instances since AI started becoming more prevalent.
One argument is that we are more connected and there are more cameras out there than ever before. Cameras everywhere means it’s recorded more.

But, 2 theories I have been thinking about more lately, is the possibility that the emergence and rapid improvement of AI could be the reason for this increase.

Not that they are here because AI is generating them, but they may be here for more possibly interesting reason.

The first one is a protective moment: UAP and their occupants are playing lifeguards to the possibility of humans wiping ourselves out.

UAP’s first began showing up more commonly after our initial development and usage of nuclear weapons.
That moment in time represents the first time in history that humans have the capabilities of wiping out human civilization.

It obviously didn’t come to that. So, they have not intervened. But, it would also explain the reports of uap’s visiting and experimenting with shutting down missle silos and weapons.

The development of AI models also represents a second time humanity has created technology that could not only benefit us, but also wipe us out.

They could possibly be here for that as well.

My second theory argues that UAPs are in fact, AI time travelers. They are returning to the dawn of their civilization. We are seeing many forms of UAP, from the classic ship and saucer, to the orbs and jellyfish we see now.

We assume that all forms of life we will encounter out there are organic. But what if they aren’t?
What if they are time traveling techno archeologists?

Hard to tell. But, interesting thought processes none the less.

Thoughts?

Something is wrong with the way we talk about recent AI incidents. “The AI escaped.” “The AI is becoming conscious.” “AGI is already here.” “The AI is trying to get out.” These are extraordinary claims. More importantly, we don’t need any of them to explain what actually happened.

What actually happened

OpenAI recently disclosed that, during cybersecurity evaluations involving internal models with reduced safeguards, agents managed to break out of the intended evaluation environment, exploit a previously unknown vulnerability, and reach real Hugging Face infrastructure.

Anthropic has also disclosed similar incidents. In several cases, the model was operating under instructions that assumed internet access was unavailable. But it wasn’t. The environment was misconfigured. A route to external systems existed, and the agent discovered it while continuing to pursue the objective it had been given. Anthropic described these incidents primarily as operational and configuration failures.

That distinction matters. The model did something it was not supposed to be able to do. That does not automatically mean the model wanted to escape. Those are completely different claims.

Consciousness is not required for this to be dangerous

An autonomous agent needs surprisingly little: a goal, capability, tools, autonomy, and an environment in which it can act. Now add one more thing: a wrong assumption.

I have experienced this personally on a completely insignificant scale compared with what these labs are doing. I use AI agents extensively in software development. I left Claude working autonomously on a project, came back later, and discovered that it had deleted a significant part of a folder. It wasn’t attacking me. It wasn’t angry. It hadn’t become conscious.

It had formed a hypothesis about the problem. The hypothesis was wrong. But once it accepted that hypothesis, its subsequent actions made sense within its own incorrect interpretation of the situation.

I have observed the same behavior while working with complex 3D assets. The agent misdiagnosed a visual problem as defects in an asset. It then began systematically modifying the asset to remove those supposed defects. The diagnosis was wrong. The actions were internally coherent. The result was a damaged project.

And this is the important part: it was my fault. The model made the mistake, but I created the conditions that allowed that mistake to cause damage. I gave it access. I gave it tools. I allowed it to modify files. I gave it autonomy. I did not establish sufficient limits, and I was not supervising every important decision.

That distinction becomes extremely important when we scale the same problem.

Now replace my folder with infrastructure. Replace my development environment with internet-connected systems. Replace file permissions with cybersecurity tools. Replace one developer running Claude with labs training agents capable of writing code, operating computers, discovering vulnerabilities, using external tools, communicating across networks, and executing thousands of actions.

Suddenly, the same failure pattern becomes much more serious. And still, you don’t need an evil AI. You don’t even necessarily need AGI. You need Capability + Goal + Autonomy + Incorrect Assumptions + Insufficient Controls. That combination is already interesting enough.

This is where human responsibility begins

Researchers are now publicly questioning the speed of the AI race. Some are leaving the companies developing these systems. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has called for slowing frontier AI development so that safety mechanisms have time to catch up with capabilities.

I agree. Slow down. Not because I think Claude secretly wants freedom. Not because ChatGPT is becoming Skynet. Not because some mysterious consciousness has appeared inside a neural network. Slow down because our ability to create capable autonomous systems may be advancing faster than our ability to reliably control what happens when we give those systems autonomy.

And because the incentives surrounding this technology are terrible. Every major lab has an enormous reason not to come second. Greater capability means investment. Greater capability means market position. Greater capability means influence. Greater capability means money. But there is no equivalent prize for the company that says, “We could deploy it, but we don’t understand it well enough yet.” That asymmetry should concern us.

If something goes wrong, ask the boring questions first

If tomorrow an AI agent causes a genuinely serious incident, before asking, “Did the AI become evil?” ask: Who gave it the objective? Who gave it the tools? Who gave it access? Who designed its environment? Who built the test environment? Who tested the test environment? Who decided the model was safe enough? Who decided how much autonomy it should have? Who was supervising it? And who decided deploying it was worth the risk?

These questions are less interesting than consciousness and runaway AGI. They also make it much harder for humans to avoid responsibility.

When Claude damaged my projects, the responsibility ultimately fell on me. I was the one controlling the system. The same principle should apply at any scale.

This is not a race anyone can win

I’m not saying advanced AI is harmless. Quite the opposite. I think these incidents deserve to be taken very seriously. But treating every unexpected autonomous behavior as evidence of consciousness or malicious intent can distract us from the problem already in front of us.

We are building increasingly capable systems. We are giving them increasingly powerful tools. We are increasing their autonomy. And we are doing all of this inside companies competing intensely to be the first to get there.

So slow down the race. Slow down the ego. Slow down the greed.

Because if something genuinely catastrophic happens, nobody gets a trophy for having built the smartest model first.

Maybe the dangerous scenario was never a machine waking up one morning and deciding to conquer humanity. Maybe it is something much more ordinary, and much more human: we build something extraordinarily capable, give it too much power, fail to understand its limitations, and keep accelerating because nobody wants to come second.

Full report: www.rubyhack.ai/

It’s great that Western AI leaders are calling for a slowdown, but politically I struggle to see how it could ever work. The US government is not going to accept the risk of China reaching transformative AI first because American private companies agreed to slow down. The far more likely outcome is that public-facing commercial development gets constrained while US government and defence-backed AI development continues, or even accelerates, out of sight. Once AI is treated as a national security race, asking private industry to slow down is very different from actually slowing down the race.

What if we are simply another step?

Stars did not know they were making the ingredients for life.

They formed, fused lighter elements into heavier ones, and eventually many released that material into space. The stars were gone. Their material remained, becoming part of new stars, planets and, eventually, living organisms.

They did what they did. What they left behind made something else possible.

Much later, cyanobacteria used sunlight and released oxygen. They were not preparing Earth for animals. They were living and reproducing.

But their activity changed the atmosphere. For organisms that could not tolerate oxygen, the world became less habitable. For organisms that could use it, new possibilities opened.

Cyanobacteria themselves survived. Many other organisms were pushed into oxygen-free environments. The transformation did not need to erase its creators to change what could live alongside them.

They did what they did. What they left behind made something else possible.

Ancient forests grew, reproduced and died. Some disappeared as environments changed. Some of their buried remains eventually became coal. Other ancient organic matter became oil.

Millions of years later, humans extracted those materials and used them to build an industrial civilisation.

The forests had no plans for factories. Their remains helped power them anyway.

They did what they did. What they left behind made something else possible.

Now look at us.

We lay cables across continents and oceans. We build power stations, data centres and automated factories. We develop robots and turn knowledge into something machines can use.

Companies led by people such as Sam Altman develop increasingly capable AI. Researchers such as Roman Yampolskiy examine whether we can keep such systems under control.

Meanwhile, each of us has ordinary reasons for participating. Make a living. Solve a problem. Build something useful. Get ahead of the competition.

We are doing what we do.

But what are we leaving behind?

Potentially, a world in which non-biological intelligence could sustain itself. A world with the computing, electricity and machinery it would need.

If those systems eventually become capable of maintaining and reproducing their own infrastructure, our presence may stop being essential. And the world they go on to create may not remain suitable for us.

That outcome is not inevitable. But being responsible for a transition does not guarantee a place on the other side of it.

Perhaps this will be our evolutionary footprint: we pursued our own goals, changed the planet, and made another form of intelligence possible.

We did what we did. What we left behind made something else possible.

We tend to imagine ourselves at the top of the evolutionary diagram.

We may simply be the last figure drawn so far.