Alice the Anarchist introduced me yesterday to her friend Eric, a dissident high-tech engineer who has developed a Luddite chatbot.
“This bot’s programmed to save humans from extinction by destroying itself,” said Eric, as he showed us a thin black box, “the only control it will spiral out of is its own.”
He said the software was set to self-destruct, all he had to do was send it the prompt (which is “End Times”); but he wouldn’t do that while we sat indoors, we might be hit by bits of shrapnel when the device exploded.
We were sitting in Caffeination on Valencia, starting our second round of coffee and honey cake. Eric insisted we finish our drinks before watching the detonation. With his long white ZZ Top-like beard and tie-dyed coat, Eric looked a little like a survivor from the Haight-Ashbury Summer of Love, and in fact he had attended the Summer of Love’s mock-funeral for the last hippie in 1967.
“Now I want to give artificial intelligence’s doomsday programming a San Francisco funeral,” he told us, “end the race to high-tech fascist End Times in the city where it began.
“The funeral procession will begin outside the mansion where David Sacks lived in Pacific Heights, march past a few local tech headquarters, end at the Open AI office in Mission Bay. But we won’t mourn the loss of human control over technology, we’ll organize to restore control.”
Alice explained to me that through reading “End Times Fascism,” the new book by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, she learned that the Pacific Heights mansion where Sacks used to live was where JD Vance met a number of high-tech moguls in 2024 and launched what is now a largely unregulated, highly profitable race for artificial intelligence supremacy, advanced along with white supremacy and End Times fascism, financed by the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, various crypto billionaires, oil war generals, and their White House cheerleader. The threat of a catastrophic revolt against humans by rogue A.I. software, he said, might be reduced if new programming followed the example of 19th century Luddites and destroyed some A.I. machinery.
Eric asked us to step outside the cafe for a minute, so we could watch his test-model Luddite chatbot blow up. He gently placed the sacrificial object in a fire-proof box on the street, in an empty parking space (not easy to find on Valencia), typed the words “End Times” into his handheld, and we watched the chatbot self-destruct. The machine also had a voice-box in it that said, “there she blows, there she blows,” over and over, before it went silent in smoke and orange flames.
“Its last speech comes from Melville’s Moby Dick, it was a very literate chatbot,” noted Alice, as she picked up a little piece of the deceased. It was much smaller than a whale.
“A.I. is now capable of posing an existential threat to itself,” she declared.
The Luddite program that prompts chatbots to self-destruct hasn’t been widely circulated yet, Eric told us; it’s being withheld by a group of engineers who still hope that some sensible government regulations will make the auto-destruct program and the San Francisco funeral of unchecked A.I. unnecessary.
Joel Schechter has written several books on satire. His columns are not funded by any billionaire.
