Views expressed here do not reflect my views on AI, where I’m a lot less doomy than this would appear to express .
A long, long time ago
I can still remember how that AI progress used to make me smile
And I knew if alignment researchers had a chance
They’d save us all from AI advance
And alignment would be solved for a while
But “AI winter” winter made me shiver
With each new benchmark they’d deliver
Bad news on the doorstep
I couldn’t take one more step
I can’t remember if I cried
When I saw the race to ASI
But something touched me deep inside
There’d be a day, the humans would die
So bye, bye to all of humankind
Used Claude code in Fable mode, but my credits ran dry
All those alignment researchers gave it a good try
Singing this will be the day that I die
Oh, this will be the day that I die
Did you write the book of If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies?
And do you have faith that we’ll align?
Cause Neil Nanda tells you so?
Now, do you believe in Grok and Sol
Can alignment save our mortal souls?
And can plan A let progress advance real slow?
Well I know that you’re in love with in
Terpretability research, cause I saw him
With a grant for AI brains
Man the probes there were insane
By that progress I was quickly struck
With neither pink carnation nor pickup truck
But I knew that we were out of luck
Some time soon, we would all die
So bye, bye to all of humankind
Used Claude code in Fable mode, but my credits ran dry
All those alignment researchers gave it a good try
Singing this will be the day that I die
Oh, this will be the day that I die
Now for ten months, we’ve been in foom
And progress is going through the moon
But that’s not how it used to be
When the timelines said 2033
In a voice borrowed from Gary
(Marcus) and a voice that came from Emily
Bender—and while the books of great renown
Were saying that progress would slow down
Those bettors were badly burned
When the verdict was returned
And while Vance read AI 2027
And we conservatively predicted growth rates above 11
(%) and critics sometimes talked about Jevon
It became clear we all would die
So bye, bye to all of humankind
Used Claude code in Fable mode, but my credits ran dry
All those alignment researchers gave it a good try
Singing this will be the day that I die
Oh, this will be the day that I die
Hugging face in a fucking race
AI would come by, 28
Growth rates 8 times as high and rising fast
Intelligence explosion if just one tenth as fast
The AI tried for a forward pass
With the skeptics, on the sidelines, in a cast
Now the halftime air was sweet with doom
And nobody could deny the FOOM
Skeptics said scaling would stall
But that didn’t happen at all
Cause the humans tried to take the field
The AGI refused to yield
Do you recall what was revealed?
Some time soon, we would all die
So bye, bye to all of humankind
Used Claude code in Fable mode, but my credits ran dry
All those alignment researchers gave it a good try
Singing this will be the day that I die
Oh, this will be the day that I die
Oh there we were all in an AI race
With Elon’s datacenters in space
With no time left to start again
So come on alignment be nimble, alignment be quick
Alignment needed one weird trick
Cause aligning something smarter than you is hard
Oh and as I watched the benchmarks climb
I knew we would never align
No alignment done by AI
Could help if AI’s misaligned
As capabilities climbed high into the night
Till it could disempower all of life
I saw the superintelligence laughing with delight
It became clear we all would die
So bye, bye to all of humankind
Used Claude code in Fable mode, but my credits ran dry
All those alignment researchers gave it a good try
Singing this will be the day that I die
Oh, this will be the day that I die
I saw Amanda Askell on the news
I was hoping for some happy news
But she just smiled and turned away
I went down to Lighthaven
Where I hoped they had a plan for this situation
But the man there, said it had been closed since, 28
And in the streets, the children screamed
The lovers died and the poets dreamed
Not a word was spoken
The humans all were broken
And the three men I admire least
The AI made by those companies
They bought the train that would make us beat
The day, the humans died
So bye, bye to all of humankind
Used Claude code in Fable mode, but my credits ran dry
All those alignment researchers gave it a good try
Singing this will be the day that I die
Oh, this will be the day that I die
So bye, bye to all of humankind
Used Claude code in Fable mode, but my credits ran dry
All those alignment researchers gave it a good try
Singing this will be the day that I die
Oh, this will be the day that I die