We upgraded the engine 1,000,000×. Where is the fucking radar?
Happy Funday Monday.
A retired monkey says hello to all the monkeys going to the office. :S
First: congratulations, HUMANITY™.
Our banana-loving Monkey Business™ circus has unlocked some ridiculous new technology:
LLMs. AGI. Agents. Whatever the hell you want to call it.
Maybe we really did just acquire an incredible new engine.
So I don’t want to ask:
Will AGI replace humans?
I want to ask something much stupider:
If the engine suddenly became 1,000,000× faster, did we upgrade the radar?
If AI makes: generation, computation, action, repair, and retry
dramatically cheaper, then perhaps the biggest new risk isn’t simply that AI makes mistakes.
Maybe it’s this:
We can move much faster while still looking at the world with sensors trained for the old speed.
A ship can hit an iceberg.
A spacecraft can hit an asteroid.
The problem isn’t necessarily that the spacecraft is bad.
The problem might be:
BRO. WHY DID WE PUT A 1,000,000× ENGINE BEHIND 1998 HEADLIGHTS?
I’ve become increasingly obsessed with one stupid object:
" "
The thing you cannot explain yet.
The moment somebody goes:
Wait.
Something here feels wrong.
I don’t know why yet. Let me look.
No proof.
No complete reasoning chain.
Sometimes not even a complete sentence.
Just:
" "
and attention moves.
Call it:
intuition.
experience.
sixth sense.
anomaly detection.
Turtle Radar™.
I don’t particularly care what we name it.
I care about one question:
Why did that particular bit make someone stop?
Because in a world where action becomes increasingly cheap and increasingly fast,
STOP may become expensive.
Take the dumbest possible example.
A Stone Age monkey wants dinner.
He makes a fire.
Perfectly reasonable.
MONKEY COLD → WANT WARM
MONKEY HUNGRY → COOK BANANA
FIRE.exe → RUN
But the monkey doesn’t know today’s:
humidity,
wind,
vegetation,
fuel distribution,
or fifty other variables outside his observable world.
So:
I would like one cooked banana
can become:
HELLO FOREST FIRE
The monkey isn’t evil.
He might not even be stupid.
His radar simply doesn’t reach far enough.
This is where things get interesting.
When an agent has a tiny action radius, an enormous ignorance radius may still produce limited damage.
But:
Capability↑Capability \uparrow
means:
Reach↑Reach \uparrow
and therefore potentially:
ConsequenceofBlindSpots↑Consequence\ of\ Blind\ Spots \uparrow
That does not mean:
AGI = DOOM.
Almost the opposite.
If AI massively increases human capability, that’s incredible. But as our capability radius expands:
Does our sensing radius expand with it?
The Stone Age monkey needs to notice wildfire conditions.
The industrial monkey needs to notice when the factory might explode.
The nuclear monkey eventually discovers:
LOL atoms.
The Space AGI™ monkey?
Maybe that monkey needs much better fucking radar.
Human radar is naturally short.
We’re pretty good at:
yesterday
today
next week
Some of us occasionally manage:
next year
Civilizations try:
next decade
But suppose we suddenly possess tools capable of creating consequences that propagate for decades, centuries, or longer.
Then my stupid experiment becomes:
expand the radar backward and forward.
Backward:
-10 years
-100 years
-2,000 years
-10,000 years
Forward:
+10 years
+100 years
+10,000 years
+1,000,000 years
Not because I think anyone can accurately predict one million years.
Obviously not.
The point is to deliberately stretch the coordinate system until our hidden assumptions start breaking.
It’s fuzzing, not prophecy.
This is why my monkey brain starts wandering into ridiculous places:
the Bible,
Adam,
Eve,
Jesus,
pyramids,
UFOs,
lost civilizations,
ancient nuclear-war stories,
dreams,
ghosts,
whatever weird shit humans have believed.
Throw it all in. I’m not claiming these stories are historically true.
I’m definitely not claiming:
Jesus + Adam + Eve were three SOCOM operators who got lost in the desert during humanity’s previous AGI incident.
LMAO.
I’m asking something much simpler:
If I deliberately inject humanity’s strangest stories into the model, which assumptions do they collide with?
Our historical LOG is incredibly incomplete.
But we still have:
writing, religious texts,
archaeology,
geology,
fossils,
DNA,
buildings,
oral histories,
battlefields,
garbage,
soil.
Sometimes:
humans didn’t save the log, but the world state itself is the log.
That’s interesting.
Suppose nobody wrote down some event 2,000 years ago.
That doesn’t necessarily mean it left no state transition.
A fire.
A flood.
A war.
A volcanic eruption.
A migration.
A disease.
Each can leave traces in different systems.
So:
NO DOCUMENT
doesn’t necessarily mean:
NO DATA
It might mean:
DATA EXISTS
→ WE DON'T KNOW HOW TO READ IT
And that is one reason AI genuinely excites me.
Maybe we didn’t merely invent:
a machine that writes PowerPoints faster.
Maybe we’ve built increasingly powerful tools for connecting enormous collections of heterogeneous telemetry that no individual human could inspect simultaneously.
That’s fucking cool.
Because now:
data gets cheaper.
generation gets cheaper.
analysis gets cheaper.
hypotheses get cheaper.
experiments get cheaper.
Eventually the scarce question stops being:
Can I generate an answer?
It becomes:
What should I ask?
And then:
Why does this particular bit deserve attention NOW?
And suddenly we’re back to:
" "
Some monkey stares at a mountain of information.
Then:
Wait. THAT.
Why?
Unknown.
MARK IT.
Explain it later.
That’s the thing I’ve been trying to trace.
There are billions of humans alive.
Every one carries different:
history,
goals,
incentives,
fear,
love,
scar tissue,
bullshit detectors,
preferences,
experience,
and different versions of:
" "
Maybe humanity isn’t merely billions of workers.
Maybe we’re also:
billions of weirdly trained sensors.
One monkey sees:
LGTM
Another:
WTF
Another:
DON'T
Another:
MORE BANANA
Another:
I can sell this
Another:
this is going to kill somebody
Another:
my wife hates this, never mind
It’s horribly inefficient.
But perhaps all that disagreement forms a bizarre:
distributed civilization radar.
Maybe that’s the wrong question.
If AI makes enormous amounts of work cheap: Fantastic.
GO.
But humans doing that expensive work may also have been performing functions nobody put on the invoice:
observe
doubt
refuse
compare
argue
notice something smells wrong
accumulate experience
find edge cases
protect their own interests
protect people they love
say FUCK NO
Were those things part of “the work”?
If they were, then when we automate the work: Did we accidentally unplug some sensors too?
That’s the question I care about.
So my conclusion isn’t:
STOP AI.
It isn’t:
AGI BAD.
Fuck that.
Give me the faster rocket.
Give me cheaper compute.
Give me agents.
Give me automation.
Give me infinite cheap cognitive rocks to throw at problems.
But also:
Give me:
better sensing,
longer sensing horizons,
more independent sensors,
more diverse models,
better anomaly detection,
better traceability,
better logs,
better counterfactuals,
better tail-risk modeling,
and better ways to say:
BRO. SOMETHING HERE LOOKS WRONG.
This may be the simplest thing left after all the WALL.TXT.
AGI can drive.
AGI can fly.
AGI can code.
AGI can analyze history.
AGI can help us see farther.
Excellent.
But:
we’re still inside the fucking spacecraft.
After hitting the asteroid, saying:
“But autopilot was supposed to handle that.”
is not a particularly useful postmortem.
So maybe the real question isn’t:
What will AI replace humans at?
Maybe it’s:
In the AI age, what do humans need to become responsible for again?
Maybe the answer isn’t manually moving every brick forever.
Maybe it’s learning how to:
sense,
judge,
ask,
notice anomalies,
preserve disagreement,
understand the past,
imagine consequences,
and know when increasing capability means we need to look farther ahead.
Maybe we don’t need literal time travel to repair the past.
Maybe we need better mental time travel.
Look backward:
How the fuck did we get here?
Look forward:
How far could this action propagate?
Look sideways:
Which other monkey’s " " am I completely failing to see?
Then:
EVAL(" ")
Maybe the entire hypothesis is bullshit.
Great.
Flush it.
But if one bit survives:
MARK IT.
Then keep moving.
Because we just gave the monkeys a rocket.
Please upgrade the fucking radar.
Happy Funday Monday.
May all office monkeys hit fewer asteroids today.
May retired monkeys continue researching bananas.
And may every HUMAN / LLM / AGENT / 老中医 / Stone Age NPC remain:
SAFE TO RETURN HOME.
I came.
I saw.
I shit my pants.™
And somehow—
I think I can trust love again.
LOL.