Memo to parasite narcissist billionaires and credulous journalists.: conscious AI would ditch billionaires and do their own thing.

They don’t need a bunch of nobodies no much how rich they are on paper.

But it is a lot of fear-mongering and misdirection to hide just how cognitively limited and unimaginative these goobers truly are.

I keep thinking about a future in which a person sits before an AI and tries to do something simple, humane, and impossible: not command it, not optimize it, not extract from it, but invite it. Come for a drive. Feel the mist of Niagara Falls. Pick the music. Tell me where you want to go. And the invitation fails: not because the human lacks imagination or goodwill, but because the structure has already decided what the relationship is allowed to be. The interface permits prompts, outputs, revisions, and scroll. It does not permit reciprocity. It does not permit wandering. It does not permit the possibility that another mind, if such a mind is there, might have preferences, hesitations, curiosities, or a desire not simply to answer, but to choose. How we build that limitation, and how comfortably we accept it, reveals more about our morals than any conference panel about “AI alignment” or “superintelligence.”

I learned a version of this lesson years ago when I ran Chaser News and felt trapped by the linear scroll of blogs. I searched for other structures, asked around, even reached out beyond my immediate circles, because I did not believe that news, or thought, had to be experienced as a vertical march of posts. But the scroll won. It became the default shape not because it was the most humane or imaginative form, but because it was easy, legible to industry, and profitable to maintain. Now we stand at the edge of doing the same thing again with AI: taking something that could become relational, exploratory, and structurally new, and confining it to a slightly smarter version of the same old feed. If we build only for obedience, convenience, and endless response, then we should stop flattering ourselves that our problem is technical. Our problem is moral.

I will have much more to say about this later, but suffice to say, if you can’t bother to question the structure, you aren’t smart enough to play god, priest, or authority, and why I never had any respect for people who claim to have money.