Silent Sirens, Flashing For Us All
A funny thing has happened to me recently - I’ve stopped spending every hour of every day thinking about or working on AI. Somewhere between the midnight feeds of my newborn, preventing my toddler from hurling themselves off of the high surfaces they’ve started being able to reach (or expertly, as if gifted with a kind of radar, finding the sharpest thing in the house or on the street and running directly at it), and preparing large amounts of nutritious food for my newly expanded family, I’ve found myself without the time necessary to be staring directly into the alien portal etched in silicon from whence the changes in the world are being summoned.
I won’t lie, it’s been oddly relaxing.
But it has also caused me to reflect on what is happening with AI and how naturally illegible it is. I walk around the town in which I live and there aren’t drones in the sky or self-driving cars or sidewalk robots or anything like that. And when I spend time on the internet, aimlessly scrolling social media sites in the dead of night as I attempt to extract a burp from my newborn, I might occasionally see some synthetic images or video, but mostly I see what has always been on these feeds: pictures of people I do and don’t know, memes, and a mixture of news and jokes.
And yet you and I both know there are great changes afoot. Huge new beasts lumbering from some unknown future into our present, dragging with them change.
I saw one of these beasts recently - during a recent moment when the time stars aligned (my wife, toddler, and baby were all asleep at the same time!) I fired up Claude Code with Opus 4.5 and got it to build a predator-prey species simulation with an inbuilt procedural world generator and nice features like A* search for pathfinding - and it one-shot it, producing in about 5 minutes something which I know took me several weeks to build a decade ago when I was teaching myself some basic programming, and which I think would take most seasoned hobbyists several hours. And it did it in minutes.
With the simulation built, I stared at the graphs outputting the species numbers and I played with some dials to alter the dynamics and watched this little pocket world unfold. I started extending it according to questions I had: What if I did a day/night cycle so I could model out nocturnal creatures and their interplay with others? And could I create an external database for storing and viewing the details of all past simulations? And could I add some 3D spatial coordinates to the landscape and the agents so I could 3D print sculptures if I wanted? And to all these questions I set Claude to work and, mostly, it succeeded in one shot at all of them. And I kept playing with it.
The experience was akin to being a child and playing with an adult - I’d sketch out something and hand it to the superintelligence and back would come a beautifully rendered version of what I’d imagined. And we went like this for hours: it was hypnotic and amazing and deeply fun and in a few hours I built a very large, sophisticated software program. Of course, some of the underlying code is pretty ghastly, and inefficiencies abound, but goddamn it - it works! And it was fast.
And then my baby woke up and started screaming, as babies tend to do, and the spell broke and thus back to diapers and cradling and shushing I went.
But for the next few days I couldn’t help but think of that simulation I’d built, lurking there on my computer, ginned up in some call-and-response between me and the proto-mind I can access via API.
Most of AI progress has this flavor: if you have a bit of intellectual curiosity and some time, you can very quickly shock yourself with how amazingly capable modern AI systems are. But you need to have that magic combination of time and curiosity, and otherwise you’re going to consume AI like most people do - as a passive viewer of some unremarkable synthetic slop content, or at best just asking your LLM of choice “how to roast a turkey and keep it moist”, or “TonieBox lights spinning but not playing music what do I do?”. And all the amazing advancements going on are mostly hidden from you.
The challenge here isn’t solely solved with interface designs, though there is a rich space to be explored here beyond the standard chat interfaces. The challenge here is deeper and it relates to how much curiosity an individual person has, how easily (and affordably) they can access powerful AI systems, how well they’re able to convert their curiosity into questions or tasks that can be given to an AI system, and how much time they have available to experiment with working in this way. This is the end of quite a deep funnel, and one which narrows a lot.
This problem will worsen in 2026. By the summer I expect that many people who work with frontier AI systems will feel as though they live in a parallel world to people who don’t. And I expect this will be more than just a feeling - similar to how the crypto economy moved oddly fast relative to the rest of the digital economy, I think we can expect the emerging “AI economy” to move very fast relative to everything else. And in the same way the crypto economy also evolved a lot - protocols! Tokens! Tradable tokens! Etc - we should expect the same kind of rapid evolution in the AI economy. But a crucial difference is that the AI economy already touches a lot more of our ‘regular’ economic reality than the crypto economy.
So by summer of 2026 it will be as though the digital world is going through some kind of fast evolution, with some parts of it emitting a huge amount of heat and light and moving with counter-intuitive speed relative to everything else. Great fortunes will be won and lost here, and the powerful engines of our silicon creation will be put to work, further accelerating this economy and further changing things.
And yet it will all feel somewhat ghostly, even to practitioners that work at its center. There will be signatures of it in our physical reality - datacenters, supply chain issues for compute and power, the funky AI billboards of San Francisco, offices for startups with bizarre names - but the vast amount of its true activity will be occurring both in the digital world, and in the new spaces being built and configured by AI systems for trading with one another - agents, websites meant only for consumption by other AI systems, great and mostly invisible seas of tokens being used for thinking and exchanging information between the silicon minds. Though we exist in four dimensions, it is almost as though AI exists in five, and we will be only able to see a ‘slice’ of it as it passes through our reality, like the eponymous ‘excession’ from Iain M Banks’ book.
It is incumbent on all of us to attempt to see this high-dimensional object for what it is - to approach this amazing moment in time with technological optimism and appropriate fear (Import AI, 431). And joy. And trepidation. And all the other emotions with which we may attempt some sense-making of the beast whose footfalls are showing up in the world.
- Published in Import AI 438 this week.