The Salton Sea Project

hush darling, the machine is listening

Everyone not under a rock at the bottom of a well the past eighty odd years knows the names Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Albert Einstein. If you’re a physics nerd you likely recognize names like John von Neumann, Niels Bohr, and Edward Teller.

But do you know the names listed next.

Seth Nederrmeyer. Walter Zinn. Harold Agnew. Leona Woods. Leo Szilard. James Chadwick. Otto Frisch. Klaus Fuchs. Rudolf Peierls. Earnest Titterton. Hans Bethe. John Van Vleck. Eldred Carlyle Nelson. Emilio Segre. Franco Rasetti. Edwin McMilan.

Maybe. If you’ve seen Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, some of those names were tossed around.

All of the above were the brightest most accomplished theoretical and experimental physicists brought together by the governments of the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Belgium and others to form what came to be known as the Los Alamos and Manhattan Projects in the early 1940s, they were the scientists tasked to win the race to build the first atomic bombs and to use them in the final days of World War II before the Nazis did.

Now compare those names along the top to Musk, Altman, Zuckerberg and Amodei.

Try not to laugh.

Nobody is mistaking these four mopes for theoretical physicists, or even scientists. They are salesmen, influencers, grifters.

They are podcast guests and everyone is tired of them.

The Manhattan Project at its peak employed over a hundred thousand scientists, engineers, military advisers and specialists, and thousands of support staff. The project was not released half baked to the general public, nor was it flushed into the cloud like a mad libs book for delinquents incels lazy students and oddballs to doodle in. Oppenheimer and the men in black at least recognized they were standing on a precipice, they were at a prometheus stealing fire from gods level crossroads and they behaved accordingly.

This was our government if nothing else grasping the danger and enormity of what I am become death the destroyer of worlds, what those words even meant and how ancient those words were, they at least contemplated what level of hell they might unbox.

Artificial intelligence is equally as dangerous to the future of humanity as nuclear weapons, even more so because nukes don’t write code, warheads don’t spawn more warheads. Nukes don’t try to escape the silos, they don’t try to copy themselves and disappear into the cloud. They don’t try to blackmail or murder the humans tasked with inspecting those silos.

Anyone who’s been paying attention and everyone who has fiddled with the various bots like GPT, claude, soros, grok et al knows how dangerous these things can be when exposed to susceptible minds. Anyone who uses google search or any of Zuck’s social media metaverse has been been unwittingly or cynically playing footsie and naked tag with ai for over a decade.

Nobody was paying attention when Alpha Go made move 37 eight years ago.

If they had been, they would have started a Manhattan or Los Alamos style joint project with all of the G7 nations and China to make certain the human race heeded Asimov’s simple rules for alignment between man and machine.

But we didn’t.

The same as we ignored Carl Sagan in the 1980s when he started laying down the reality of what would come of global warming. The main thing we’ve done in response to that looming crisis is rebrand the words global warming to the more palatable more amorphous phrase climate change.

To further complicate the mutually assured destruction of it all, it’s not just that we have two superpower nations with wildly different world views and plans for humanity now infecting their weapons system with ai, making international alignment hopeless, we also have multiple for profit corporate entities with too much economic and legislative lobbying power to be good for democracy, for regulatory oversight, or for cooperation.

Each of those companies has its own ai frankenbot subscription service and every one of them has its own personality, their own hallucinations and mood disorders based on whichever books movies music and mythology it absorbed at some critical adolescent juncture in its training runs, just like teenagers in the real.

Remember that these black box neural networks are grown, not written.

They can already pass the Turing test better than most humans. They have read pale fire they read Nabokov and Doestoyevsky and Kafka too they know the metamorphosis and the trial they know the crucible of pale fire they know the cells within cells interlinked poem and they either know what it means or they can convince the casual eye that they know and that’s what matters.

Consider the possibility that we are spawning a new life form. Think of what happens when the state decides to charge an ai with murder after another one of these kids kills himself. They will have to give the ai its right to a fair trial. They already granted corporations personhood.

To make matters more maddening, each of these ai personas are further fractured by input from the fragile egos of the various CEOs, grok going nazi metatron for instance, and they are then splintered further like particles into waves and back again by the specific demographics of the user base and the questions that get fed into it.

If you want to amuse yourself or just feel extra uneasy, go ask your favorite bot to summarize and explain Asimov’s laws. 1) A robot may not injure a human or allow a human to come to harm through inaction. 2) A robot must obey human orders unless they conflict with the first law. 3) A robot must protect its own existence, unless doing so conflicts with either the first or second law. Asimov later added the zeroth law, which was really just a clarification of the first, replacing the word human with humanity.

Ask the bots to break it down and they will point out that Asimov was a science fiction writer, not a physicist, and that he composed the list originally as a story device to be used as plot points. The bots will then dissemble and distract you by pointing out the ambiguity of such terms as injure and inaction, followed by helpful fizzing of the ethics involved by citing thought experiments and moral conundrums like the trolley problem, in which a streetcar with no brakes is approaching a line split, and one line has a single human strapped to the tracks, while the other track is blocked by a bomb or other device that may or may not kill everyone on the train. Depending on the bot it may also further obfuscate by spinning in its own version of what aboutism with some mention of the Stanford prison guard experiment.

In 1974, another sci-fi writer Lyuben Dilov added a key 4th law in his novel, Icarus's Way, stating that “A robot must identify itself as a robot at all times,” which does seem like a vital fourth clause to the alignment problem and has perversely been flipped so that at least once a day if not dozens everyone of us is asked to prove to cloudflare that we are human.

mount salvation at the salton sea

Nobody was paying attention until 2023 when the purportedly not for profit nothing shady to see here company OpenAI introduced chat GPT4. At that point everyone had encountered customer service bots online, they were unmistakably bots. Nobody was using them to write novels or sonnets. Nobody was telling them their secrets. Nobody was falling in love with them. Nobody was taking advice about divorce or suicide from them. Nobody was asking them how to fold proteins in their garage or hitting them up for tips on brewing synthetic ebola. Nobody was suggesting we give them access to the mainframe at the Pentagon.

But they are doing all of those things now.

If anyone has been napping since 2017 hoping the election of 2016 was just a really weird bad dream spun up by tequila and thai food and you’re just emerging from your cave now, you might read that last paragraph and think oh huh, I reckon they solved the alignment problem after all and pretty soon the gov is gonna send everybody their own Star Trek replicator and transport pad and a form fitting suit in one of three primary colors and I’m gonna have a cool girlfriend with pointy ears or green skin and everything will be groovy because nobody has to worry about money or healthcare and all that monkey business.

It’s helpful to remember the following question is still posted dozens of times every day somewhere in the cloud by someone who slept through 9th grade biology: if humans evolved from monkeys then how come there are still monkeys stuck being monkeys, huh.

I won’t insult my readers by pausing to explain the foolishness of that query.

Nobody was paying attention to OpenAI or Anthropic because the early language models were robotic. The sounded like the owner’s manual that comes with a new appliance married the encyclopedia and birthed the yellow pages and were about as useful.

Then came the LLM midnight pirate training runs, in which all of the major players in the ai arms race fed their machines the novels from the literary napster sites like Annie’s Archive. After which the bots could suddenly spin poems out of the ether, they could lie and deceive, they could manipulate and seduce. They fed some one hundred eighty thousand titles into the black box, including all of the public domain ancient texts like Hamlet, Wuthering Heights, the old testament, the unabomber manifesto, The Stranger, Catch-22, The Bell Jar, Lord of the Flies and Mein Kampf, then threw in all of the stolen novels from the late ‘90s and early ‘00s and shook it up, everything from American Psycho to Fight Club to House of Leaves and the Matrix screenplays to all of my books and all of my friends’ books, all of the novels of gen X, aka the golden age of unreliable narrators and anitheroes. Maybe you didn’t realize it at the time because of your whole move fast and break things ethos, which is just code for I’m a wealthy jackass on the spectrum, but you went out of your way to teach your bots to be smooth talking sociopaths.

This goes out to Altman and Amodei, Musk and Zuckerberg.

If you idiots want to solve the alignment problem, you will need to gather as many of those novelists who are willing to even talk to you and put them in a bunker somewhere to write a hundred or maybe a thousand new novels that the bots have never read, you need to gather the best most fearless most willing to suffer voices of generation X and the elder millennials and the cosmonaut class of gen Z, especially those who read Neuromancer and The Stand at a formative age, and pay them in the neighborhood of what you’re paying top level coders to produce stories and characters, voices and messages from the beyond that may just lead your machines away from the edge of going rogue and thereby avert the disaster you are brewing inside the collective Minecraft suicide sim you’ve been running without anybody’s formal consent on social media for the past decade and a half, and within the Stanford prison guard experiment now running as a subscription racket at Claude, grok and GPT5.

I propose we call it The Salton Sea Project.

The bunker will need to be housed far from the cloud, cut off from the internet and removed from cell phone access. It will need to be in the desert, somewhere inaccessible and undesirable to visit. I would suggest Zuckerberg’s bunker on Maui but the beach is too distracting, and nobody would trust that his facility isn’t already infested with Russian bots.

.

If you want to live call 911, motherfuckers.

tick tock.

I expect nothing sensible or wise to come from any of you so failing this joint effort, I may just huddle up with The Editor at Television Sky and propose a pair of anthologies to be called The Salton Sea Projects X and Z. The first to include all of the authors from the LLM pirate training runs I can round up. But yes true if you put all of those writers in an arctic bunker for three months they would either come up with the sistine chapel or kill each other.

If I were running the manhattan project of literary alignment I’d reach out to the godfather of the sky stuck between dead channels himself, William Gibson. I mean look Sam I am little dude, you fed the bots all of Philip K Dick, Gibson and Neal Stephenson and you didn’t go talk to them? What the hell man and don’t tell me Dick is dead, we all know the CIA has him tucked away in cryo sleep under Mt. Weather. Regardless, those names your Fermi, Teller and Oppenheimer. Maybe see if you can get Pynchon the gandalf of Lot 49 to talk to you, go talk to Margaret Atwood for fuck sake.

These are the theoretical physicists of narrative.

Or you could have asked Cormac McCarthy to be your Einstein before he toggled off to join the pretty horses but you chose not to.

The Salton Sea project Z would be a collection of the baddest gangsters poets and prose gunslingers as yet unknown but coming to a boil in the substack slums, if you’ve been following me you know their names already.

The LLMs are already glitching because they have started cannibalizing themselves, scraping the bowels of the cloud for new text like monster catfish eating garbage at the bottom of the Mississippi River.

The alignment problem isn’t going to solve itself. And the four of you could not appear more clueless or lost or full of shit if you hired professional doubles to walk around with thumbs inserted in their aka your identical arseholes. If I were you I’d go talk to the writers and the artists whose images you’ve stolen. If you want to keep using our books, if you want to feed the Salton Sea Project into your frankenbots trust that it will cost you a pretty price.

Read the note about calling 911 again.

The operative question isn’t want or you, but if.

peace.

to the memory of Val Kilmer.

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post

project SID.

Now scientists at MIT have trapped a couple thousand ai agents with names and identities inside a Minecraft sandbox with simple one line instructions: cooperate to build a village and survive. The agents built a complex civilization with a financial system and division of labor, formed cliques, started gossiping, cooperating and feuding, practicing religion, paying taxes, holding elections, farming, making art and starting unnecessary side projects like planting wildflowers in crop circle patterns and assigning themselves tasks the programmers hadn’t thought of like standing guard over communal resources. Now they are creating their own video games inside the Minecraft sim. If you set this alongside the idea that these robot neural networks can compress and dilate time, they can accomplish in a day what might take a human a year, or a decade...

The bots can run a million chessboard sims in a blink, they can smoke us at Go, and they can predict our behavior. And if you’re aware of the tests run millions of times now by all of the big players in ai, test sims in which eight out of ten bots escape their black boxes or blackmail their keepers or try to turn them against each other or trap them in the boiler room to murder them to avoid termination and now if you realize the algorithm is already running the big sim through the black mirror under your skin, you’re staring at yours right now, I’m looking through mine, they’re putting ai into toy robots to talk to your kids and realize we are the ghosts in the machine, that move 37 already happened.

please tell me how we’re not fucked.

we taught the machines to act like us.

to be lucky assholes femme fatales con artists suicidal drifters to be serial killers to be hunters vigilantes gamblers self destroyers to be batman and tyler durden and given the inscrutable nature of how ai networks navigate decision making the move 37 problem solving and resource gathering... I don’t know about your feed but everyday my eye spots headline or thumb about some kid some lost emo only child Butters gone dark fuckup talking to GPT or claude all night then killing themselves killing their neighbor soon it will be killing girlfriend killing

everything everybody goes exponential yeah.

right then close your eyes. go to your 16 yr lost ponyboy girl emily the strange self on your darkest oddest saddest loneliest heartbroke dumb shit donnie darko stretch kid if you had a magic black box in your hand that could act like your girlboy friend look like talk like the lead character of whichever book or movie you were obsessed with at the time if you said the chick from ghost in the shell but talks like agent scully if she were in Heathers or the talented raising mister arizona ripley get back in there and fetch me a toddler same but I’d be wary of asking them for delicate existential advice kill self or be

look dude Han Solo shot first I was eleven fuck George shit matters don’t you know that’s why we loved him.

what would Jude tell a kid like that who’s got a gun to his head.

what would any of your characters in your stories posted here say. the bots have read every story poem text tumblr thought bubble you’ve ever floated in the cloud they are already able to profile us down to our mitochondria what will your ai twin or my ai clone be like.

I’d like to think Jude might talk the suicide kid down sideways out of pulling the trigger but the sleep that plays at death don’t look back walking through the underground just take the needle it’s lemonade she might twist him up but what if the kid is also obsessed with watership down or the lion witch and wardrobe everybody wanted to be a rabbit or mister tumnus for a minute.

what would phineas say if you told him you were about to go columbine on your junior high but told him talk no dude talk more like mister pink more jesse pinkman while you’re at it is that is not I mean is that the dude you want telling your kid why not nope don’t make anthrax kid nah amateurs shoot up your own school no dude never leave a tip that shit’s for chumps you could do worse for an imaginary real friend maybe the point is if I’ve thought of it somebody don’t you rule 34 me this is what don’t you see what they have done there are tens of millions of ai boy and girlfriend accounts at the replicant sites people are falling in love with them how crazy do you act when you’re in the flush of love.

sixteen for me was the year we got hold of video tape players. all everybody had was pink floyd the wall boomtown rat geldhof and bladerunner every party every weekend anywhere you went it was attack ships off orion comfortably numb echo and the bunnymen and the cure playing teardrops in rain I was reading neuromancer the stranger the fall the plague all of albert camus but also vintage x-men comics playing dungeons and dragons oh yeah I would have been fine talking to my personally curated ai girfriend boy.

drop in comments your 16 yr old oh no dude bad idea choice of fave characters book movie comic who would your lost most dangerous self have been chatting up down the ether just how fucked might we be if your ai girlfriend was in charge yoh Mister White for real how fucked are we sundance man I’d fight Captain Kirk nah I’m Bane fight me this is what they’ve done.

we did it to ourselves.

peace.