# The Day Humanity Died (Parody of American Pie)

> Source: <https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3Ad3LqFibkfcMzC2u/the-day-humanity-died-parody-of-american-pie>
> Published: 2026-08-14 18:27:52+00:00

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
