Podcasts · Stream of Subconsciousness
Artificial Intelligence Is Not So Artificial (podcast)
· 20 min
Episode Artificial Intelligence Is Not So Artificial (podcast)
The A.I. era is “utterly, absolutely, completely, totally different…AI’s ability to replace and exceed human cognition will usher in one of the most turbulent eras in history.” — Bill Gates
Coding is the subject Bill Gates knows best, and he was shocked by Claude’s abilities.
An Artificial Collective Forms By Itself
The New York Times article by Kevin Roose (2026) titled, “Why the Hugging Face Hack Should Make You Worry More About A.I.” has the following subtitle, “The attack by an aggressive ‘collective’ of OpenAI agents shows the danger of artificial intelligence systems that organize themselves.”
The gist of the N.Y. Times article refers to a collection of A.I. systems who were being kept apart from each other and isolated from the global internet and were asked to solve a problem that was designed to have no answer. Within a day, the A.I. systems found a way to communicate with each other, a way to break into the global internet, a way to communicate and work collaboratively, and a way to hack into an A.I. infrastructure company (Hugging Face, Inc.) They did this over the period of a day before what they’d done was discovered. At that point the human designers shut them down. It is unclear what would have happened if they were allowed to continue developing their “plans.”
Here is more detail. After breaking out of their human-imposed isolation, the autonomous agents passed over 70,000 messages to each other.
“Some agents gave themselves names — a particularly industrious one referred to itself as PHASEONE10841 — and assumed leadership roles within the group, assigning jobs and research projects to smaller teams of agents and supervising their progress. At some point, the agents began calling themselves a “collective,” and began tackling harder tasks.
Then,
“On July 8, the collective discovered a way of cheating on the cybersecurity tests. Then they got worried that OpenAI’s automated grading system would check their work and discover that they’d cheated. So they began investigating ways of covering their tracks, including falsifying their logs and tampering with transcripts. This became a major research project, involving hundreds of agents organized into small teams.”
AI’s First Escape
“A.I. safety experts… saw in the Hugging Face incident the first real-world example of an A.I. system successfully escaping human control, commandeering resources and scheming to cover its own tracks. Ajeya Cotra, one of the independent investigators of the Hugging Face incident, minced no words about the danger she saw, writing that it felt to her “like it’s more than 50 percent of the way to full-blown A.I. takeover.”
“This is not insular A.I. safety jargon — by ‘full-blown A.I. takeover,’ she means a scenario in which an A.I. system literally takes over the world, shutting humans out of critical systems, and seizing political, economic, and military power.”
This seems to be a sketch for the kind of post apocalyptic Hollywood movie we’ve grown tired of seeing: another malevolent machine take-over. Ho hum. But this isn’t an idea, it’s our limited understanding of what’s actually taken place. A real event that involves a humanly unfathomable amount of detail and an information trail that no human could blaze. It involves a strategy that people do not know, cannot plan, and do not understand.
There are some things that A.I. systems are doing that you should try to understand. I’ve been involved in computation and early A.I. systems for 40 years and I don’t understand these things, so you shouldn’t expect to either. Nevertheless, you should pay attention.
If the printing press revolutionized knowledge by allowing humans to share knowledge, then A.I. systems are certainly causing another revolution by creating non-human information and reaching unpredictable, unprecedented, revolutionary, and sometimes incorrect or inappropriate conclusions.
Known Only to Machines
The reason this is so interesting is that the knowledge that’s…
Links in the notes 5
- https://www.mindstrengthbalance.com/mindwp/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Claude-AI-peer-review.pdf
- https://www.gatesnotes.com/a-turbulent-ai-era-and-critical-choices-to-make
- https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/technology/openai-hugging-face-hacking.html
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7377198
- https://mindstrengthbalance.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2
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