Sorry to bother you on Saturday. Thought it was important to share.
The first thing you learn about a loom is that it is easy to break.
The shuttle runs on a track that is prone to humidity. The heddles hang from wires that break. The reed is a row of thin metal strips bent by hand, which are just as easily bent back. If you tighten it too much the warp beam breaks. Treadles become loose at the joints. breast beam, cloth roller, shaft and claw, leash rods, castle; The entire instrument is made up of wood and string held together by tension. It is an example of ingenuity and craftsmanship, but is just as delicate as clothing made from wild plant fibres. It is also a fundamental tool of the entire textile industry, retaining its relevance in our days of heavy machinery, factories, energy facilities and datacenters.
It is not that easy to break into a datacenter.
It is made of concrete, steel and copper and has a large size. It has interchangeable servers, and biometric locks and tall electrified fences and heavily armed guards, and redundancies upon redundancies: every component is duplicated so that no single failure can bring the whole thing down. There’s no rod to loosen or reedle to lean back on.
But let’s say you managed to bypass the guards, jump the fence, open the locks, and locate all the servers. Then you have to face the algorithm. The datacenter was never your goal; There is a hidden algorithm inside. It doesn’t play on that rack, or any rack for that matter. It is a digital pattern distributed across millions of chips, reflected across continents; It can be reorganized elsewhere, and it has been trained to hook you at a glance, like a modern Medusa.
But let’s say you managed to avoid the staring, stop the replication, and break the pattern. Then you will have to face superintelligence. The algorithm wasn’t even your goal; The living, supernatural, latent superintelligence is hidden within. Well, there is nothing you can do here: it Always “getting out of the box” and, suddenly, you are inside the box, like a chimpanzee being caught by a human playing with a banana. It is very tasty…
There is another way to destroy a datacenter: you can bomb it, like someone hitting a loom with a hammer.
some have argued This is a way to ensure that no rogue superintelligence gets out of the box. A different evil creature took the proposal seriously: Last month, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard released satellite footage of OpenAI’s Stargate complex in Abu Dhabi and promised “complete and utter destruction“
But you probably don’t have an evil nation to fulfill your wishes. Perhaps You Instead there will be bombing and we don’t want that to happen. This is what happens with evil minds: you can’t predict them.
and yet. Two hundred years of increasingly impenetrable technology – from looms to datacenters – hasn’t changed the first thing about the people who live with it. The development of technology is as much a feature of the world as the enduring fragility of the human body.
And so, more and more, it is the people who are the weak link in this chain of inevitable destruction. And these are the people who will be targeted.
April 1812. A mill owner named William Horsfall was returning home from the Cloth Hall market in Huddersfield, Britain, on his beautiful white horse. He had spent several weeks boasting that he would reach his saddle covered in Luddite blood (a precious substance that served as fuel for mills).
A few yards later, at Crosland Moor, a man named George Mellor – aged twenty-two –shot him. It struck Horsfall in the groin, who, nominally-deterministically, fell from his horse. People gathered and started condemning him for being an oppressor of the poor. Naturally, he was loyal to his principles in death as in life, so he could not listen to them. He died a day later in an inn. Mellor was hanged.
They say, history rhymes.
April 2026. A datacenter owner A man named Samuel Altman was driving home in his beautiful white Koenigsegg Regera car from Market Street in San Francisco, USA. He spent weeks boasting that he was going to scrape and steal our blog posts (a valuable substance that serves as fuel for datacenters).
A few hours later, on Russian Hill, a man named Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama – twenty years old –Allegedly Molotov cocktail thrown at his house. He hit the outer gate. Altman and his family were sleeping, but they are fine. Moreno-Gama remains in custody.
This kind of violence should be condemned. This is not a method. It’s terrible that this is happening at all. And yet, for some reason, it keeps It is happening.
Last week, the home of Ron Gibson, an Indianapolis councilman, shot thirteen times. The marks of the bullets are still there. The shooter left a message on their door: “No data center.” Gibson supports a datacenter project in the Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood. He and his son were safe.
In November 2025, a 27-year-old anti-AI activist Murder threats made against people at OpenAI’s SF officesSignaling a lockout. He had expressed his desire to buy weapons.
Increasingly, as the objects of the people’s anger and frustration and despair become out of reach behind fences and guards, or are reduced to another void, or rise above the clouds, the mob will turn its invincible emotions toward humanitarian targets.
I do not want to trivialize the complaints of those who fear for their future. I don’t want to defend Altman’s decisions. But this is not the way. This is how things turn into chaos.
And I wonder: How desperate can people get before these isolated incidents become a spiral of violence that neither datacenters nor rich people’s homes will be able to resist?
whenever i listen Amodei Or altman That I could lose my job, I don’t think “Oh, okay, so allow me to pay you $20/month so I can adapt to these uncertain times that have coincidentally fallen on my lot.” I think: “YouFor fuck’s sake, You Are doing this.” And I consider myself a very well-adjusted person, so imagine what non-adjusted people think.
There is a lot of friction in increasing violence, but as soon as this sentiment becomes common, that friction disappears. Normally, this peters out anyway, but there is one scenario where I see it inevitably escalating:
If people feel that there is no place for them in the future.
If they feel expelled from the system – they are unable to buy goods, their skills have become obsolete, their chance to earn a living has been replaced by hordes of AI agents, they feel like we are actually going to die (so far, violence has mostly been associated with security AI movements) – then they will feel they have nothing to lose.
And then, and I’m sorry to be so obvious, it’s die or be killed.
Perhaps the most serious mistake the AI industry made after creating a technology that would completely disrupt the entire white-collar workforce before ensuring a safe transition was making it clear by constantly preaching: “We are creating a technology that will completely disrupt the entire white-collar workforce before ensuring a safe transition.”
And, to top it off, they add “be careful below.”
The difference between AI and, let’s say, Loom, is that it’s been deployed all over the world, and it’s been treated in a kind of self-aware way. AI leaders know there are problems coming up and so they can’t help but constantly talk about them and so they are telling us, which makes them look like psychopaths. How do you think people will react to this? You should be a lot less self-conscious and a lot more self-aware: Realize how you look!
(No part of journalism, any part inclined toward forensics rather than sensationalism, can do a better job against them than their words. These people lack basic self-awareness. For what it’s worth, New Yorker piece I am referring to what Altman also mentioned his blog postWhich made me see him more as a flawed human being rather than a sociopathic strategist. My sympathy for him would probably never have been very high, but it increased after reading this.)
People hate AI so much that they blame it for everything that happens in their lives, regardless of the truth. That is why they mix real arguments like data theft with fake arguments like water. Employers do this too. Most layoffs are not caused by AI, but it is the perfect excuse to do something that is otherwise socially reprehensible.
AI has become a complete scapegoat. It doesn’t help that the entire AI industry has decided that throwing stones at its own rooftop is its best selling point: if AI is so powerful and so dangerous and will soon become so ubiquitous, what’s so unexpected about people blaming everything on it?
Nothing Altman can say can justify violence against him. This is an undeniable truth. But unfortunately, violence may still persist. I hope not, but I think we’re seeing what appears to be the first case.
I just hope that, unlike the cases of ChatGPT-induced psychosis, chatbot addiction, AI-blamed job layoffs and the rising trend of illiteracy, it stops.
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