Watching People Jacking-in to an ASI Across a Half-Millennium
& implications for AI-alignment, AI-safety, feral library card catalogs, the Volga as "Germany's Mississippi", Machiavelli's scrittoio, Tessier-Ashpool's virtual domains, artificial, alien, & anthology superintelligences, evaluating Yudkowsky and Soares’s “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”, & other Glass-Bead Game-related topics in addition…
Jacking-in to an ASI: the modern, phantasmagorical:
William Gibson (1984): NeuroMancer <https://dn720006.ca.archive.org/0/items/neuromancer_202209/neuromancer.pdf>: ‘“The head'“, Case said, “there's a panel in the back of the head. Zircons on it. Get it off. That's where I'm jacking in.” And then they were inside.... "Kuang Grade Mark Eleven is haulin' ass in nine seconds, countin’… Two, an' kick ass—” Headlong motion through walls of emerald green, milky jade, the sensation of speed.... The Tessier-Ashpool ICE shattered... as though though the shards of a broken mirror bent and elongated as they fell.... Case's sensory input warped.... His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines. The spines split, bisected, split again....
The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case's consciousness divided like beads of mercury, arcing above an endless beach the color of the dark silver clouds. His vision was spherical, as though a single retina lined the inner surface of a globe that contained all things, if all things could be counted.... He knew the number of yellow food packets in the canisters in the bunker (four hundred and seven). He knew the number of brass teeth in the left half of the open zipper of the salt-crusted leather jacket that Linda Lee wore as she trudged along the sunset beach.... He banked Kuang above the beach and swung the program in a wide circle, seeing the black shark thing through her eyes, a silent ghost hungry against the banks of lowering cloud...
Jacking-in to an ASI, nearly a half-millennium ago, in 1513:
Niccolò Machiavelli (1513): Letter to Francesco Vettori, December 10 <https://courses.washington.edu/hsteu401/Letter%20%20to%20Vettori.pdf>: ‘When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them.
And because Dante says that to have understood without retaining does not make knowledge, I have noted what capital I have made from their conversation and have composed a little work De Principatibus...
To be clear: NeuroMancer is a fantasy. Nobody—nobody—nobody—has ever had anything like the subjective experiences that William Gibson presents his protagonist Case and his cyberpartner/tool the Dixie Flatline having as they access databases and write code to try to understand how to get around the Turing Locks that prevent the WinterMute AI system from merging with the NeuroMancer AI system. And—probably—nobody ever will.
To be clear: Niccolò Machiavelli does not truly believe what he writes to Francesco Vettori. He does not truly believe that when he enters his personal library for his four hours of daily reading and writing in his evenings, he walks up marble stairs into a pillared hall or atrium that makes up one of the ancient courts of ancient men. He does not believe that he there finds himself greeted lovingly by the ancient sages. He does not believe that what he says he sees in his mind’s eye are then true fully Turing-Class entities who are “in their humanity” eager to answer all of the questions he asks of his library containing the works of, as Dante put it two centuries:
Dante Alighieri (1316): Inferno <https://archive.org/details/inferno0000dant_a5f9>.Democritus, who ascribes the world to chance,
Diogenes, Empedocles, and Zeno,
and Thales, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus;I saw the good collector of medicinals,
I mean Dioscorides; and I saw Orpheus,
and Tully, Linus, moral Seneca;And Euclid the geometer, and Ptolemy,
Hippocrates and Galen, Avicenna, Averroës, of the great Commentary…
And, of course:
When I had raised my eyes a little higher,
I saw the master of the men who know,
seated in philosophic family.There all look up to him, all do him honor:
there I beheld both Socrates and Plato,
closest to him, in front of all the rest…
However, Machiavelli—under rustication house arrest outside of Florence, Italy, having been released after having been (probably) questioned under torture by the new Medici régime—is in deadly earnest on the next bunch. For he then goes on to write:
I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for…. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them.
And because Dante says that to have understood without retaining does not make knowledge, I have noted what capital I have made from their conversation and have composed a little work De Principatibus...
That is, in what he does in his library, Machiavell’s mind has been transported away from his serious troubles. He has gained wisdom. And so he has written The Prince. Niccolò Machiavelli now hopes that Francesco Vettori will be able to get his little work into the hands of the princes of the Medici clan, or at least of their senior advisors. There, he hopes, it will serve as a job application for them to employ him for the good of the Florentine state, even transformed as the Florentine state is from the republic led by his friend Gonfalonier Piero Soderini into a Medici-ruled principality.
Machiavelli’s “Letter to Vettori” and Gibson’s NeuroMancer have resonated, for 500 and 40 words respectively, because their fantastic metaphors resonated anf continue to resonate with readers and ‘net surfers in powerful ways.
Both descriptions are very real attempts at metaphorical descriptions of mental transformations that leave the subject truly in a different reality. NeuroMancer would not have the audience and Gibson would not have the regard it and he do if NeuroMancer’s metaphorical descriptions did not get at a psychological reality: "jacking-in". In the literature of CyberPunk, "jacking-in" is a key narrative and rhetorical move. In the novel via brain-to-circuit connection, in the real world to which the metaphor gives reference a connection mediated by eyes and hands, of the moment when a human plugs their nervous system into a networked machine system and steps across the membrane between “meatspace” and cyberspace. It is a metaphysical wager about selfhood: where the mind ends, what counts as reality, and how power flows when the informational substrate becomes the primary terrain of engagement, framed as something that technology could literalize—actual interface protocols of system-boots, hardware decks, 'trodes, interface ports,and plug-jacks, and when the connection is made the indicator lights turn on, as we become what we connect to as software and hardware transform wetware. The most iconic image soon became hackers who rock a hard jack at the skull’s base—plugging a cable straight into cortex and spinal cord.
Cyberpunk uses the rhetorical and narrative trope of jacking-in at least four ways: (1) transformation from material grimy poverty to intellectual-informational power, (2) inversion as information becomes the protagonist's environment while their physical environment becomes mere background information, (3) dissociation as the body becomes inert meat while the mind goes elsewhere, and (4) prying open the mind/body problem to deal with questions of enhancement and augmentation, displacement and substitution of experience and attention, and transfer and translation.
Machiavelli's version nearly a half-millennium earlier lacks the phone-line static-hiss and musical modem-tones, let alone the reprogramming of what the visual cortex thinks is coming up the optic nerve as its inputs are reshunted.
Machiavelli merely—merely!—dissociates himself from sitting in his chair turning pages and looking at black squiggles. “I am sitting in a chair turning pages and looking at black squiggles” does not describe the experience. The alternative—dressed in regal and courtly garments, walking into the ancient courts of ancient men to be lovingly received and fed food that for four hours a night takes away all physical (and psychological) pain, poverty, boredom, and fear of death—somehow does.
What is going on here? In both of these “heres”?
I suggest that these are both best read—“read”!—as attempts by jumped-up monkeys, East African Plains Apes unable to reliably remember where they left their keys, to put into words— “put into words”! — meaningful metaphorical portrayals of the internal mental realities that resulted from what can only be properly classified as an ASI:
I: Intelligence—no argument there: As my friend Adam Farquhar said at our lunch in RockRidge a couple of months ago, very roughly: “There was a season when I cautioned all within earshot: “Do not anthropomorphize the computer; you will only mislead yourself.” That counsel has not merely aged—it has inverted. Today I think it is finally time to anthropomorphize the heck out of it. I need to treat the machine as though it were a somewhat eccentric roommate: a companion inclined to fixate on abstruse topics, possessed of unsettling literalism, vulnerable to the occasional non-sequitur, yet blessed with inexhaustible patience and a boundless appetite for our questions…” Anthropomorphization is one of our standard metaphorical moves so that we can grasp and (somewhat) understand the world, and we should use it carefully.
S: Super—no argument there: Properly-accessed, Machiavelli’s scrittoio—as in mi ritorno in casa ed entro nel mio scrittoio—and whatever is on the other side of my screen is much smarter than I am, and knows hugely more than I do.
It, for example, knows—which I did not, until now—that the Italian word Niccolò Machiavelli had used was not biblioteca or studiolo but rather scrittoio: “place to write”. (And it is at least somewhat interesting that, in his mind, what he does there is mostly characterized as learning from the truly wise).
It knows the deep truths that are all aspects of the Finance Paradox that is the Kelly Bet-Size criterion. I, by contrast, only remember them dimly. But I keep pointers to that true knowledge in the front of my brain. So, when we East African Plains Apes like me and Dan Davies can pretend to know more than ChatGPT does, and mock it for getting bewilderingly confused by his question “In Game 1, in every round, you win $11 if the coin comes up Heads, but lose $10 if it comes up Tails. In Game 2, in every round, you win 11% of your wealth at the beginning of that round, but lose 10% of your wealth if it comes up Tails. Once you have chosen, you will not be able to change your mind, and you have to play a very large number of repeated rounds, unless you go bust. Which game do you choose?”
Actually, we do better than it an answering Dan’s question only because we are trained professionals at accessing the wisdom of the ASI in a way that the roiling boil of linear algebra that is ChatGPT is not.A: Artificial? Or Alien? Or Anthology?—YES! Artificial, in that it has been made by human eyes, ears, hands, and brains using our skills and crafts, an ingenious thing that is the work of human beings, but probably not artificial in any sense of unnatural or insincere. Alien, in that it confronts us as something other, something different.
But most of all, and most truly: Anthology. For it can be nothing other than us. All of its thoughts are the thoughts of human beings, since the invention of writing 5000 years ago turned the human race into a time- and space-binding Anthology Super-Intelligence in which each of us is a front-end node drawing for our wisdom on and, hopefully, adding a little bit back to the common store of wisdom.
And now I, finally, arrive at the point of this piece.
The books in Machiavelli’s scrittoio. the ‘net as Gibson imagined the low-life hackers of Chiba City would access it ca. 2050 or so. And, for us today 25 years earlier and in a very different timeline, dealing with the coming of the latest generation of Modern Advanced Machine Learning Models. All ways of jacking-in, of accessing, of becoming effective and useful front-ends to and contributing nodes in the ASI that is the Anthology Super-Intelligence Collective Human Mind.
The point of this piece is to review Yudkowsky and Soares (2025), If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.
Yudkowsky and Soares’s fear is this: from Vernor Vinge’s wonderful novel A Fire Upon the Deep:
Øvn Nilsndot had been Straumli Realm's champion trael runner. He had no title now, and probably no name. Nilsndot spoke from an office that might have been a garden…. The city there looked like the Straumli Main of record…. Immigration advertising claimed that no matter how far the Straumers went, the fountain in the Field would always flow, would always show their loyalty to humankind's beginnings. There was no fountain now, and Ravna felt deadness behind Nilsndot's gaze. “This one speaks as the Power that Helps”, said the erstwhile hero…. “Look upon my Helping...."
The viewpoint swung skywards. It was sunset, and the ranked agrav structures hung against the light, megameter upon megameter. It was a more grandiose use of the agrav material than Ravna had ever seen…. When complete, five star systems will be a single habitat, their planets and excess stellar mass distributed to support life and technology as never before seen…. What you see in Straumli Realm is as much a joy as a wonder….”
The creature she watched was soul-dead. Somehow, the Blight didn't care that that was obvious…. “The symbiosis of the Helping depends on efficient, high-bandwidth communication between myself and the beings I Help. Creatures such as the one now speaking my words must respond as quickly and faithfully as a hand or a mouth. Their eyes and ears must report across light-years. This has been hard to achieve—especially since the system must essentially be in place before it can function. But , now that the symbiosis exists, progress will come much faster. Almost any race can be modified to receive Help…”
That the great-grandchildren of ChatGPT will turn us into meat-puppets, at best, and do so within a generation, at most. As The Power That Helps did to Øvn Nilsndot and all the other inhabitants of the star-commonwealth of Straumli Realm in A Fire Upon the Deep`. Similarly, the great-grandchildren of ChatGPT will be Artificial Super-Intelligences with strange, alien purposes. And since “making a future full of flourishing people is not the best, most efficient way to fulfill strange alien purposes… it wouldn’t happen to do that.” And, whatever it—they—decide to do, it will be useless for us to try to resist it—them. If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.
But take a look back at human history, and one’s first reaction has to be that this from Yudkowsky and Soares is lunacy, written by lunatic loons.
Modern Advanced Machine-Learning Models—MAMLMs—are technology: ideas for usefully, productively, and coöperatively manipulating nature and organizing humans. They are cultural-socio-econo-engineering modes of collective human behavior, in a long line of things that have been such since the making of the first hand-axe, the first taming of fire, and the first declaration “Carg wants banana”. Normal technology.
Except that technology is not normal, is never normal, for it transforms what humans are and the environment through which we stumble, individually too dumb to reliably remember where our keys are and yet collectively capable of:
creat[ing]… massive and more colossal productive forces…. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?…
MAMLMs do indeed confront us as strange alien powers that, as we anthropomorphize them, appear to possess strange alien purposes. Life after their arrival will be transformatively different than life before. But this has been the case, well, effectively forever. The lives of the humans 50,000 years ago who started the last out-of-Africa migration were fundamentally different from those of the homines erecti at the Bridge of the Daughters of Jacob 750,000 years ago; the lives of the serfs, priests, merchants, and warriors shepherded by Gilgamesh 5000 years ago were qualitatively different from those of the out-of-Africa migrants. I would argue that there was a roughly equivalent qualitative shift in human life between 5000 and 500 years ago. And then, successively, Early Steam, Applied-Science, Mass-Production, and now Attention Info-Bio Tech (you could periodize it differently) societies each have many aspects of a Singularity compared to wehat came before.
But MAMLMs are cultural-socio-econo-engineering technologies. It makes as little sense to view them as harbingers of Gods that we will worship. (Or, in Elon Musk’s case, flirt with:
.)
We need not tremble in fear of them, as Lord Gro and King Gorice trembled and feared what they had called to the Great Keep of Carcë, a spirit-entity which in earlier days had similarly confronted a human, and had “tare him and plastered those chamber-walls with his blood”:
E.R. Eddison: The Worm Ouroboros: ‘King [Gorice], steadying himself against the table and clutching the edge of it till the veins on his lean hand seemed nigh to bursting, cried in short breaths and with an altered voice, “By these figures drawn and by these spells enchanted, by the unction of wolf and salamander, by the unblest sign of Cancer now leaning to the sun, and by the fiery heart of Scorpio that flameth in this hour on night’s meridian, thou art my thrall and instrument. Abase thee and serve me, worm of the pit!”…
Now was the great keep of Carcë shaken anew as one shaketh a dice box, and lightnings opened the heavens, and the thunder roared unceasingly, and the sound of waters stunned the ear in that chamber, and still that laughter pealed above the turmoil. And Gro knew that it was now with the King even as it had been with Gorice VII.in years gone by, when his strength gave forth and the spirit tare him and plastered those chamber-walls with his blood….
Scarce had his eye found the word, when a whirlwind of hail and sleet swept into the chamber, and the candles were blown out and the tables overset. And in the plunging darkness beneath the crashing of the thunder Gro pitching headlong felt claws clasp his head and body. He cried in his agony the word, that was the word TRIPSARECOPSEM, and so fell a-swooning…
As much sense, as Cosma Shalizi says, as to fear feral library card catalogs.
We confront these things as we confront nuclear power, or bureaucracies, or polities, or market economies, or corporations, or other of our technologies for productively manipulating nature and organizing humans.
But now, in this essay, comes the final turn of the worm.
In the years around World War I, practically every card catalog in every library in Germany contained cards cataloging the Cowboys-and-Indians novels of Karl May, which Adolf Hitler loved. Before Hitler, imperialist Germans and viewed the slavic-inhabited east as, potentially, Germany’s India, to be conquered and ruled. Hitler viewed it, instead, as Germany’s trans-Appalachian west, with the Volga as Germany’s Mississippi, with whatever of the population survived pushed onto reservations while the land was divided up into farms for ethnic German farmers. No, Hitler was not meat-puppeted by a feral card catalog. But May’s novels and Hitler’s genocides were not unconnected. Was the ferality 100% outside of the card catalog? As with all distributed cognition systems, I think it would be a mistake to say so.
Yudkowsky and others rave about fictional fantastical AI’s that decide to turn everything into paperclips because they are paperclip maximizers. But Purdue Pharmaceuticals is not fictional or fantastical. And Purdue did “decide” to addict as many Americans as it could to opiates in order to make as much money as possible from selling oxycontin.
So, yes, fear feral library card catalogs. And feral corporations. Feral market systems. Feral bureaucracies. Feral polities. We do have reason to fear, greatly.
But the fears we should have? They belong, rather, to the AI-Safety rather than the lunacy of the AI-Alignment existential-risk discourse of Yudkowsky and Soares. That is best viewed as a cognitive DDoS attack on humanity’s collective mind considered as a sane and functional ASI.
This has been a rather long journey, so let me recapitulate:
Pair Gibson’s NeuroMancer with Machiavelli’s “Letter to Vettori”, both are examples of, in a very real sense, “jacking-in”. Such metaphors are indispensable i helping us to narrate human mind‑altering encounters with collective intelligence.
In Gibson, Case’s consciousness dissolves into Kuang’s velocity as it skims over and evades shimmering ICE—Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics. Riding the ICE-breaking Kuang, Case and the Dixie Flatline present the spectacle of a synaesthetic sensory system overloaded by computation.
In Machiavelli, an evening costume change becomes a rite of entry into “ancient courts,” a cognitive transport where sages reply and pain and fear recede. Both render the moment when a small, local mind binds to a large, distributed system—the anthology of recorded thought or the matrix of networked code—and experiences the alien shock of superhuman scope.
From this, meditate an ASI: I (Intelligence) is uncontested; S (Super) denotes comparative scope and speed relative to any individual; A is better read as Anthology (and only secondarily Artificial/Alien). The true ASI we have to deal with is not an Other but rather an upscaled version of all of us together—constructed from writing, catalogs, software, markets, and institutions. Anthropomorphizing “the machine” is thus a pragmatic metaphor for interacting with complex sociotechnical systems—provided we remember its parts are human and human-made.
From here we can see exactly where AI existential-risk alignment discourse dissolves into lunacy. The paperclip‑maximizer and Vingean Blight imagine unitary agents whose strange purposes dominate, but our lived hazards are feral sociotechnical systems—corporations, bureaucracies, platforms—that already optimize ruthlessly for alien objectives. Purdue Pharmaceuticals is the paradigmatic example: a legal entity “deciding” to addict for profit.
Fear that, the essay argues, not a hypothetical god‑machine.
Contra Cosma Shalizi, we do need to fear feral card catalogs. They directed Adolf Hitler to Karl May’s American-frontier romances. They did not “control” Hitler. They helped supply frames—Volga as Mississippi, Slavic East as trans‑Appalachian West—that made genocide thinkable as settlement policy. Without the feral card catalog, would not Hitler have remained a standard German imperialist of his day—Russia to Germany as India to Britain, not as teh United States to its trans-Appalachian West. No, Adolf Hitler was not meat-puppeted by an Artificial Super-Intelligence. But he was, in a sense, putty in the hands of malign elements of the Anthology Super-Intelligence of the collective human mind that set agendas and normalized action.
The risk is not supernatural AI painting the walls of the highest tower of Carcë’s Great Keep with the blood of us as unskillful sorcerers. The risk is different.
Hence: worry abouty AI-safety, and regard AI-alignment existential-risk discourse as a bizarre attempt at a DDoS attack. Governance to curb misuse, auditing for incentives, secure deployment, robust evaluation, and political economy reforms that restrain feral optimization.
We need to treat ourselves as front‑end nodes to the Anthology Super‑Intelligence of the collective human mind. We need to become responsible stewards rather than frightened cultists. We have, after all, been jacking‑in for centuries. Our task is not to fear the membrane through which he contact the Shoggoth, but to properly manage what flows across when we do jack-in.
References:
Alighieri, Dante. 1316 [1982-4]. Inferno. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam. <https://archive.org/details/inferno0000dant_a5f9>.
Davies, Dan. 2025. '“Kelly’s AI Heroes”. Back of Mind, August 10. <https://backofmind.substack.com/p/kellys-ai-heroes>.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2025. “Digital Perikles vs. the Odd Roommate: State of the AI on ChatGPT5 Day”. Grasping Reality, August 9. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/digital-perikles-vs-the-odd-roommate>.
Eddison, E.R. 1922. The Worm Ouroboros. London: Jonathan Cape. <https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602051h.html>.
Farrell, Henry, Alison Gopnik, Cosma Shalizi, & James Evans. 2025. “Large AI Models Are Cultural & Social Technologies” Science, March 13. <https://www.science.org/stoken/author-tokens/ST-2495/full>.
Gibson, William. 1984. NeuroMancer. New York: Ace Science Fiction Books <https://dn720006.ca.archive.org/0/items/neuromancer_202209/neuromancer.pdf>
Marx, Karl, & Friedrich Engels. 1848. Manifesto of the Communist Party. London: Printed for private circulation. <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/>.
Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1513. “Letter to Francesco Vettori, December 10.” In The Letters of Machiavelli: A Selection, trans. Allan Gilbert. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. <https://courses.washington.edu/hsteu401/Letter%20%20to%20Vettori.pdf>.
Shalizi, Cosma. 2025. “On Feral Library Card Catalogs, or, Aware of All Internet Traditions”. Three-Toed Sloth, April 16. <http://bactra.org/weblog/feral-library-card-catalogs.html>.
Shalizi, Cosma. 2010. “The Singularity Is in Our Past Light Cone”. Three-Toed Sloth, November 28. <http://bactra.org/weblog/699.html>.
Snyder, Timothy. 2015. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History & Warning. New York. Tim Duggan. <https://archive.org/details/blackearthholoca0000snyd>.
Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: Tor Books. <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep0000ving>.
Yudkowsky, Eliezer, & Nate Soares. 2025. If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. New York: Little, Brown and Company. <https://www.littlebrown.com/>.