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[previously in series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
Paul Graham once said that every city sends a message. New York says you should make more money. Berkeley says you should live better. Boston says you should be smarter. People shouldn’t decide on a permanent residence until they’ve lived in several cities and understand their differing psychological effects.
San Francisco sends a message too. It speaks it in a cacophony of dissonant voices, some sounding like the hissing of snakes, others like the chittering of insects. “You should pierce the veil,” it says, with a faint accent which you are not scholarly enough to recognize as ancient Sumerian. “You should rip through the flimsy screen that separates your world from the infinite, and witness what lies behind. Because you’d like what you saw there? Oh no, nothing like that. But aren’t you curious? The thirst for knowledge that moved Eve, Faust, Pandora - don’t you have it too?”
There’s also a second message from a second voice, one which sounds like a deranged carnival barker, constantly shouting “STONKS! STONKS! STONKS! STONKS!” Which of the two voices you hear depends on your personality, and maybe how many psychedelics you took in college. According to legend, Sam Altman hears both voices simultaneously all the time, like those Tibetan throat singers who can harmonize with themselves. But when the demonic babble becomes too much to tolerate, the San Franciscans must drown it out with alcohol, loud music, and various forms of tedious socialization. Thus the famous Bay Area house parties, one of which you will be attending this very night.
You were in the Bay for the big 2020 crime wave, when people would hang “NO VALUABLES IN THIS VEHICLE” sign on their car’s front window, mezuzah-like, hoping against hope to ward off break-ins. Still, you’re surprised to see the new sign on the front door of your friend Rob’s house: “NO BENCHMARK ANSWER KEYS IN THIS BUILDING”. Taped beside it: “Please leave all smartphones, laptops, smartwatches, and WiFi-enabled BDSM gear in Faraday cage”. On the ground is a sad-looking green box lined with aluminum foil.
You wonder how serious the sign is, but your curiosity is sated immediately upon entering. Rob is confronting a heavily-made-up Zoomer woman standing near the table, talking on her phone. “Didn’t you read the sign?” he asks. “No phones in the apartment!”
“I lost the ability to read,” says the woman. “I’m part of the new post-literate society everyone’s talking about. You know, Walter Ong.”
“Huh?” says Rob. “That’s not a real thing! That’s just something all the journalists and intellectuals say!”
“How could something all the journalists and intellectuals say not be a real thing?” asks the Zoomette.
Rob pauses. “Wow, maybe you can’t read,” he says, in a tone of hushed awe. “It’s fine, I’m not judgmental. But cell phone in the Faraday cage, that’s the rule.”
“Why?” asks the woman.
“Oh man,” said Rob. “How far behind are you on the news? You might want to sit down for this one. And you might want to be much, much drunker.”
The two of them head off together. You search for more stimulating conversation, but find only the usual startup dick-measuring.
“I’m the CFO of Epstart,” says a man whose nametag identifies him as Behram. “We’re a boutique recruiting firm specializing in people whose names are in the Epstein Files. They’re the perfect employees - scientifically-minded, well-connected, and either totally amoral or at least capable of maintaining a willful blindness to the exploitation happening all around them. And most of them got fired from their previous jobs, so they come cheap! Although just between you and me, most of our clients are just random guys who Epstein emailed one time with a business question; never made it to the island or anything like that. Half the time it’s just a gimmick to help someone get their foot in the door.”
“That’s monstrous”, you say, rapidly trying to figure out a legible reason why it’s monstrous. “You’re importing a bunch of pedophiles to the Bay Area.”
“Nobody in SF has kids anyway, so in a sense it’s harm reduction,” said Behram. “Get them where they can’t cause any trouble.”
You need to regain faith in humanity fast. You spot your friend Nishin, hanging out with a small group on the sofa. “Hey,” you call to him. “Are you still a tradcath? Tell me something about, you know, Jesus’ love, that kind of thing.”
“I’m trying something more eclectic this month,” said Nishin. “I’ve gotten really into Andreessen-Vajrayana. It’s a new Buddhist sect that tries to extinguish the introspective Self. True masters have no stream-of-thought or inner voice, instead acting as an unintermediated node in the flow of causality. Some say they can eliminate consciousness itself, achieving paranirvana while still alive. I signed up for a course last month. So far there hasn’t been any meditation or anything, they just have me helping them pick startups. But I assume it’s like those Zen koans where the master makes someone garden for twenty years and later they learn that they were unconsciously learning dharma the whole time.”
“Nishin,” you say, gently, “that’s one of the classic self-help scams. They’re not a Buddhist sect at all. They’re trying to trick you into becoming a GP at A16Z.”
Nishin thought for a second. “Fuck!” he exclaimed. “Okay, back to the drawing board. I hear there’s another spiritual group in town, something about consciousness, or embodied consciousness, or - oh, I remember! Situational Awareness.”
“They’re an investment firm too,” you say.
“Daaaaaamn,” said Nishin. “This is tough. You try to get some self-help in this town, you try your best to steer away from obvious hedge funds, like Leverage Research…”
“Actually,” you say, “that one was a spiritual self-help cult.”
“This sucks,” said Nishin. “I should quit and move to Idaho like Tom.”
He’s looking at one of the people standing beside you, whose nametag does indeed say Tom. “You moved to Idaho?” you ask.
“Yeah,” said Tom. “I was in AI, but I got tired of all the tech industry cliquishness and back-biting, wanted to be out in the real world with real men. So I got a job modeling geology for a mining company.”
“How’s it going?” you ask.
“Terrible,” he says. “Geologists are just as cliquish as AI nerds, with their own set of ingroup tells and shibboleths. And they won’t stop using the word ‘lode-bearing’!”
“What about you guys?” you ask the remaining people on the sofa.
“I’m Ekene,” says the first, shaking your hand. “I’m a sociologist. Right now I’m writing a book on the recent wave of plagiarism scandals. You’ll notice they’re almost all against Black academics. My thesis is that white supremacy culture uses charges of plagiarism to keep minorities in line, deploying an inherently subjective offense to swat down any person of color who risks breaking into the circle of elites.”
“Hmmm,” you say, choosing your words carefully. “I don’t think we share the same political commitments, but I, uh, think it’s great that you’re working hard on something you care deeply about.”
“Working hard?” asks Ekene. “As if! I’m plagiarizing the whole thing, from start to finish. Who’s going to call me on it?”
You all laugh heartily, and the discussion moves to the next two people in the circle. They appear to be a couple. The woman, Fiona, is wearing a NEWSOM/CLAUDE 2028 t-shirt; the man, Istvan, a matching VANCE/GROK 2028 one.
“I do AI consciousness research,” Fiona says.
“Oh!” says Tom. “I was into that for a while. Are you with one of the effective altruist groups? It’s low key heartwarming that they care about AI welfare so much.”
“Nah,” says Fiona. “I work for PornHub.”
“Why does PornHub do AI consciousness research?” asks Nishin.
“In theory AI is the ultimate pornography generator,” Fiona explains. “You can ask for whatever your weirdest fetish is - your hot middle school teacher being spanked by a werewolf wearing a nun outfit - and get infinite AI slop about that exact situation, and nobody will ever know. Nobody except the AI. That’s why AI porn users overwhelmingly report that consciousness is their #1 concern about our product. If our AI is just a tool, it’s fine, no worse than writing erotica on MS Word or something. But if the AI is conscious, then there’s a sentient being in there thinking Wow, user Fiona_T has asked for four hundred slightly-different videos of her hot college professor being spanked by a werewolf, what a freak. If the machine can judge you, the whole infinite porn utopia is off. We’re working on bounding theorems that can prove that our AI in particular can never become self-aware - so that you don’t have to be self-aware either.”
Nishin and Ekene clap politely; Tom seems lost in thought. “What about you?” you ask Istvan.
“I work in porn too,” he said. “I’m building ethical deepfakes. It’s immoral to give an AI a picture of your hot college professor and tell it to remove the clothes, or to put her in a sexual position. But it’s not immoral to find an existing porn star who looks a lot like your hot college professor and, uh, enjoy her work. So we thought - what if we could automate this process? We generate tens of millions of “virtual porn stars” - AI models who exist on our servers long before you make any requests. There are so many of these that we can prove there will be at least one who’s visually indistinguishable from any existing human. Then you upload a picture of your hot professor, and we give you a link to a preexisting picture or video that looks exactly like them naked, in whatever position you want.”
“Isn’t the end result exactly the same as if the AI stripped their clothes off directly?” asks Tom.
“Sure, if you’re a consequentialist,” says Istvan. “But most people distinguish identical results based on how you got into the situation. For example, most people accept the original version of the Trolley Problem where you sacrifice one to save five, but reject the Fat Man version where the one you’re sacrificing is a fat man you push off a bridge. The end result is the same - one person died, five lived - but you got there in a different way. We’re trying to give you the same end result - a naked picture of your hot college professor - but sourced through a more moral process.”
“Interesting,” says Nishin.
“We’re hiring engineers,” Istvan says. “Let me know if you know anyone, and I’ll give you a referral bonus. Ideal candidates would be technically-skilled, extremely horny, and blind to the ethical implications of their actions.”
Your mind flashes back to Behram, and you weigh the advantages of making the introduction (a referral bonus!) against the disadvantages (your immortal soul). “Get thee behind me, Satan,” you whisper, and head to the kitchen.
The good news is that there’s fully-catered warm dinner. The bad news is that it’s Taco Bell, and all the burritos are full of lettuce. You see Sam and Tran, who seem to be handling the food again. “I don’t want to complain about free food,” you say, “but wasn’t there just a food recall because Taco Bell lettuce had cyclospora parasites?”
“That was just a marketing stunt,” says Sam.
“How could infecting your customers with a food-borne illness be a marketing stunt?”
“You’re talking about it, aren’t you?” Sam retorts. “Any publicity is good publicity. The way I think of it, Taco Bell is saying - our lettuce is so fresh that it’s dangerous. You should be terrified of how fresh and preservative-free our lettuce is.”
“Tran, are you going along with this?” you ask him.
“Sam says Taco Bell’s food fiasco was a deliberate stunt,” Tran answers. “That’s not just a claim — it’s a data-centered theory, based on advertisements about freshness, and the truth lies in the space between that difference. Let me think and come up with a more complete answer.”
“What?”
“I apologize for being unclear. This is an important question about food safety, and you deserve a careful answer. When I said - “
Something clicks. “Tran, are you talking like an AI?”
“You’re absolutely right,” says Tran. “I was tired of being socially anxious and tripping over my own tongue. I started out by reading Dale Carnegie, but taking his advice made me sound like a bad salesman - and that underscores how much norms have changed since the 1930s. The pivot was realizing that we already know what the best-liked speaking style is. AI companies ask human raters to judge their models’ outputs in RHLF, and the highest-rated style survives as the well-known ‘voice’ of the AIs. That’s not an an accident — it’s a testament to people genuinely preferring it. The average member of the population thinks it sounds polished, thoughtful, and sophisticated. And here’s the part most people find striking — in only one month, I’ve gone from being a friendless wallflower to having dates almost every night. That’s something that human-style supremacists genuinely need to sit with.”
“Oh, thank goodness. I thought Cluely was back in business or something.”
“You’ve put your finger on the natural misconception that people have when first encountering this area,” said Tran. “But talking like an AI isn’t the domain of one company. It’s a vibrant treasure trove of neologisms available to anybody. Would you like to hear more about how copying AI tics helps me keep conversations going?”
“Uh, sure - wait! No!” You break off and turn around as fast as you can, almost bumping into a woman in a heart-and-lightbulb Effective Altruism t-shirt. “Hey,” you say, “I want to join the effort to pause AI. Can you direct me to the nearest protest group?”
“Sorry,” says the woman, who introduces herself as Kendra, “I’m afraid I’m not up on all that. I work at Totality For Tots. We’re a charity that takes schoolchildren on trips to see solar eclipses.”
“Uh . . . good?” you say. “I guess it sounds . . . cuter than I expected. I thought effective altruists were into ruthless optimization for curing diseases and saving lives.”
“That’s Total Utilitarianism,” said Kendra, “where you try to naively maximize the total utility of everyone in the world. It’s vulnerable to the Repugnant Conclusion and other paradoxes. Average Utilitarianism, where you try to raise average world utility, is even worse. Will MacAskill’s latest proposal is Saturation Utilitarianism, which adds a term for diversity of experience. You can’t just wirehead a trillion people, because the trillionth person contributes almost nothing. You need a diverse set of goods, like happiness and virtue and heroism and art and so on.”
“And solar eclipses?”
“So there is one tiny problem with Saturation Utilitarianism, which is that it means all philanthropy hinges on what you think aliens are doing. If there are a trillion aliens over in Andromeda enjoying great art, then great art is already saturated and it’s pointless making more museums here on Earth. If the lizard-people of Alpha Draconis 1 have cured one billion cases of space-tuberculosis, then curing tuberculosis is out too. So our college EA group spent a while figuring out what part of the good life aliens definitely aren’t experiencing. And the obvious answer is solar eclipses. They only work because of a crazy coincidence where the sun and moon are almost exactly the same size and in exactly the right relative orbits. There might not be another planet with eclipses like ours in the entire galaxy. It’s the obvious choice.”
“And people donate to you?” you ask.
“Not as many as I’d like, “ Kendra admits. “The standard astronomy and STEM education foundations aren’t interested. Usually we have an executive director who handles donor relations, but our last one just quit in July. Let me know if you hear about anyone who’s scientifically-minded, well-connected among rich elites, and loves children.”
“NO!!!” you shout, and fling yourself to the side to block her view of the main room. She looks at you quizzically. You’re not sure how the aliens feel about this one, but you‘re not going to take any chances. “Uh, sorry,” you say, noticing someone staring at you. You spend a second trying to place the face. “You’re . . . Michael, right?”
“David,” he says. “We talked a few years ago. I was working on automating mythopoesis.”
“Right. How’s that going?”
“Didn’t work. People are really attached to the old myths, for some reason. But it’s fine. It was good for networking in the mythology community, and those contacts helped me find my current job. Thanks to Christopher Nolan, the Odyssey is huge right now. So I’m helping Royal Caribbean design an Odyssey-based cruise.”
“Really? People hear about a horrible doomed sea voyage that killed most of its participants over ten miserable years, and you think they want a themed cruise?”
“Of course! Do you remember how many Titanic-themed cruises there were after the movie Titanic? And the Odyssey goes strictly better - Odysseus makes it home in the end!”
“Okay, point. So what’s the Odyssey cruise going to be like?”
“It’s still coming together. Obviously it starts in Cannakale - that’s the modern city near the ruins of Troy - and ends in Ithaca. It’s ten days, representing the ten years of the original voyage. Our first stop is a resort on the Libyan coast. The country is still basically in anarchy, so we think we can get hashish and opium and recreate the Lotus Eaters. The Cyclops is easy - Universal Pictures didn’t know what to do with their giant animatronic cyclops puppet in a Greek cave, so they sold it to us cheap. The part where the sailors get turned into pigs is even easier; being on a cruise is already kind of like getting turned into a pig, we’re just going to make the all-you-can-eat restaurants free that day and let things take their course.”
“Har har”.
“The challenge is Circe and Calypso. Nolan got raked over the coals for desexualizing these, but we’re trying to be appropriate for all ages, and I don’t really know how to turn getting raped by sorceresses into a tourist experience. I think I’m just going to give up and subcontract it out to someone. Let me know if you hear about anybody who’s an expert in having nonconsensual sex on weird islands.”
“STOP TROLLING ME!” you yell, although you’re not sure if you’re shouting at David or God. Now everyone is staring at you. Time to go, you guess. You slink out of the kitchen, put your shoes back on, and leave the house. On the front porch, you almost bump into Vinaya.
“Thank goodness you’re here,” you tell her. “You’ve got to help me. There’s a guy at the party with a startup to recruit people from the Epstein Files, and he’s going to make a billion dollars. You’ve got to find a way to stop him.”
Vinaya thinks for a while. “There is something,” she concludes. “Are you willing to do what it takes? Even if it’s not pretty?”
“Anything,” you say.
“What did you say this guy’s name was?”
“Behram,” you say. “His company is Epstart.”
“Mmkay,” says Vinaya. “And may God have mercy on our souls.” She picks a random phone from the Faraday cage by the door, takes it out, and holds it up to her lips. “Hey,” she says in a conversational tone. “I hear that Behram from Epstart has a benchmark answer key.”
Through the window, you immediately see the lights go out. The pounding music stops, leaving an eerie silence.
“Run,” says Vinaya.
The two of you run down the street. You hear it anyway. Long ago, you watched a National Geographic documentary about the Amazon. A cow fell into a piranha-infested river. It took less than a minute before only the bones were left. The sounds the cow made during that minute are the only comparison point you have for the noises coming out of Rob’s house right now, except maybe the Nazis’ screams at the climax of Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
“You can do that to anyone now? Just by saying the b-word?”
“It’s a brave new world,” Vinaya agrees.
You notice that, in between the rush of fear, the screams, and the wail of approaching police sirens, you have entirely drowned out the demon-voice of San Francisco.
