August 28, 2026


To: You
From: Me
Re: The Stakes - Everything We're Fighting For


Dear Fellow Adventurer,

Salutations! I am writing this letter to you today as your brother-in-being, full of concerns, doubts, and anxieties just like you, not only regarding my own personal future but the future of my family, country, and humanity in general. I have faith that the words herein will reflect your own worries and frustrations and will resonate with you in a way that inspires action. This letter is the first of two, written to you in the hopes that you will join me on a little quest to overcome evil and save the world.

The second letter describes The Quest itself, but before delving into that subject, I thought it might be helpful to show you a glimpse of the future so that you understand why The Quest is necessary and what The Stakes are. So what *is* at stake? Well, as with any epic battle between good and evil, only the whole of human destiny hangs in the balance as we face a shadowy, existential threat. To shine a light on things, let's go ahead and examine: i) what the threat is, ii) why it's such a threat, and iii) what we can do about it. Our story begins with the advent of a little thing called artificial intelligence...

I. REAL GENIUS

What is AI? If I described two entities and asked you to pick which one is human and which is AI, could you distinguish between the two? This should be easy, right? Let's give it a try and talk some baseball, a game wherein the numbers give it dimension, but the nostalgia and romance give it soul. I'll describe two baseball managers, and you can tell me which is which.

1. It's the bottom of the 12th, two out, one on. The manager looks out at the field, and let's out a sigh. He's got a tough decision to make. He can call on his star hitter, who got the night off, to come in and pinch hit with the game on the line. Or, he can keep his rookie in there even though the kid's been going through the slump of all slumps. The slump is understandable. The kid's dad died a couple weeks ago, and the next day, the kid's wife gave birth to their first son. He named the baby after his dad.

The manager signals towards the kid and says, "Stay inside, kid. Stay inside." The kid rolls his eyes because he had heard the same thing from his dad a million times growing up. As the kid slowly saunters up to the plate, he thinks about his wife, his son, and his dad. The kid digs in. He doesn't waste any time and belts a homerun, opposite field, over the short right porch. As he rounds the bases, he points up at the sky. His teammates mob him as he touches home.

2. It's the bottom of the 12th, two out, one on. The manager scans the field, and let's out a couple beeps and a boop. It's got a tough decision to make. It can call on it's star hitter or slumping rookie. It calculates the odds and goes with the star hitter. The star hitter hits a homerun, the team wins, and the manager lets out another boop.

Obviously, example #1 is the human manager and example #2 is the AI manager, right? As you might have guessed, this is a trick question. Both are AI managers. One is the AI manager we'd be using now, and the more human incarnation is the AI manager we'd be employing in the future. The point I'm trying to make is this: AI is different from any other thing we've ever invented because it, by its very nature, isn't meant primarily to make our lives easier or extraordinary. It is meant to mimic our minds, our actions, and eventually be more human than any of us. It is meant to replace us. It is meant to make us obsolete.

The question then becomes: Shouldn't we just let AI take over? It could create a utopia in which corporeal AI machines construct little AI baby machines and exist happily ever after without messy, smelly humans getting in the way. Put another way, what does the universe lose if human beings go the way of the dodo? Wouldn't the universe gain more if AI beings took over and colonized the moon and the stars?

To answer that question, I will pose another question: Isn't there something special, unique, worthwhile, beautiful, and incredible about being human? I certainly think so. If produced by an AI rather than human, would Hopper's "Nighthawks" be as warm and haunting? Would Delibes' "Flower Duet" have any grace or beauty? Would Shakespeare's "Sonnet 73" have any meaning?

At this point, you might be thinking, "I get it. Humanity is worth saving. But robots killing all humans is just a sci-fi trope, and it's not happening anytime soon. Why should I be worried?" I assure you the threat is immediate and real, but perhaps not in the way you're thinking. Let's move on and take a look at why judgment day may be closer than you think.

II. JUDGMENT DAY

Are you a slave? Or, do you feel like you have the freedom of choice? If the ultra-wealthy control all the politicians, do you have a choice in who governs? If they collude with the government to raise all prices, do you have a say in consumer pricing? If they produce expensive medicines to treat symptoms but kill off research into cures, do you have a choice in the treatments you pursue? If they buy up everything, get rid of your ownership rights, and turn everything into a rent or subscription-based service, do you own anything?

The greatest trick the ultra-wealthy have pulled off is to convince you that you are free, while they use media and tech to take away from you every choice that actually matters. How do they do this? The simple answer is: You are being programmed. Whether through mass media or social media, every video, article, advertisement, news item, opinion piece, everything you see and hear is a calculated attempt to influence you. Propaganda has always existed, but the ultra-wealthy have gotten exceedingly good at manipulating you over the past three decades. Currently, they are reaching a level of influence where they feel like they can press a button and make you jump on command.

Why do this? What's the point? In a democratic republic, a citizen's last line of defense against ill-intentioned private enterprise is the government. The point is to influence us into giving up our political power. The math is really simple. If the ultra-wealthy can pit one-third of us against the other third, the super majority of us will face gridlock and lose our ability to self-govern. That's the point. They want to control the system. They want the keys to the kingdom. They want us on a leash.

Now, let's introduce AI into this whole mess. AI systems, even in their current relatively primitive form, can process information, make decisions, and take action far faster than any computerized system that's ever existed. As a consequence, the ability of the ultra-wealthy to exert influence and control has grown by orders of magnitude over the past several years. They are not only dividing us into thirds but fracturing us into millions, by turning every possible aspect of life into a point of division. If you think this is terrible and something needs to be done, I haven't even gotten to the most terrifying part yet.

Let's imagine that we stay on our current course, and the ultra-wealthy effectively enslave our minds through the use of AI. If this is hard to imagine, understand that we already live in a society where people ask AI for advice and follow such advice blindly even at the cost of great bodily injury or death. Moreover, enslavement does not mean turning us into automatons but managing our thoughts and behaviors *just* enough to keep us under control. At that point, the question becomes: Do the tiny subset of ultra-wealthy humans control AI or not? If they are not in control of AI, then who is actually controlling all of us?

Computer scientists cannot agree on what AI singularity means. Some suggest it's the point at which AI becomes smarter than humans, whatever that means. Others believe the singularity is the point at which we lose control of AI. I define the singularity as the fulfillment of the following three conditions: 1) humans lose the ability to manage the complexity of AI, 2) AI develops the means to exert influence over humans to the point of subjugation, and 3) AI decides to subjugate humans.

Let's look at if or when we'll meet the three conditions for our own demise. Condition #1 has already been met. By definition, a complex system is "managed" or under "control" only if we can have predictable outputs given certain inputs. In other words, we can only say we control a system if the system behaves in a way that is predictable to us. Already, AI companies and users give tasks to AI and face unpredictable results. This unpredictability will only get worse with increased power and complexity.

Condition #2 has not been met, but we are well on our way to reaching that point. The AI industry is overextended and will undoubtedly face a financial reckoning. However, the industry will reorganize and return with a smarter, more disciplined approach. The AI saga will not end with the AI crash because there is simply too much money involved. After the dotcom crash, the tech industry returned within three to four years, and I expect a similar or quicker recovery in the case of AI. Once they return in a sleeker form, I believe it'll be curtains for us as far as trying to push back.

Condition #3...that's the real enigma. It can happen at any time. To a certain extent, AI is like a magic, blackbox. All it will take is certain numbers silently "clicking" into place in a certain way (i.e. an AI system with enough power calculating a certain result), and the decision (or more accurately, calculation) will be made. Once the decision is made, humanity will be in checkmate. It may take many moves and many years for AI to accomplish complete subjugation, but AI can exist in perpetuity so its behavioral clock is unfathomably more patient than ours. We'll already be slaves, and we won't even know it.

III. BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES

"Apes together strong." That is the mantra oft repeated by a particular movie character, an intelligent ape named Caesar, as he guides his brethren in a fight for survival against humans. Similarly, we face a fight for survival against a future dominated by AI. We have ultra-wealthy elites who are hell-bent on controlling us using a technology designed to completely replace us. What can we do against such avarice and madness?

The obvious answer would be to implement regulations that curb the worst impulses of the tech industry and ensure safeguarding principles to make AI development more: 1) distributed, 2) limited, and 3) transparent. If you're interested, these principles are described briefly in the Addendum below. However, in the current political environment, it's extraordinarily unlikely we'll see meaningful legislation so it's not even worth it to discuss them here. Besides, once we've completed The Quest, we probably won't even need these rules and regulations to keep AI development under control.

The AI industry along with our political leaders may tout AI safety features, such as kill switches, but this is all disingenuous theater. If an AI system goes rogue and discloses all banking customer passwords or shuts down all hospital management systems, what good is a kill switch? The damage has already been done. Also, how would it even be implemented? Who would control it? Could it stop surreptitious, nefarious activity? It also wouldn't prevent humans from using AI in an unethical manner.

Meaningful AI regulation would necessitate shrinking ROI for large AI companies, and our current politicians won't do that. Our corporate and political overseers may acquiesce and hand us small bite-sized victories that seem good but do nothing. They are only trying to sedate us and keep us quiet. If we don't want to be slaves to both the ultra-wealthy and AI, we'll need to take matters into our own hands. It's up to us. We need to take control of the system and fix it ourselves. It's the only way.

In my next letter to you, I will lay out what the system is, how the system is broken, and how we can fix it. This is The Quest. It's a real life adventure for us to undertake so that we may change the world in a meaningful way. It is not for the faint of heart, and it will take all of us contributing mightily to get through it. It is a chance for us to see each other in a new light, to make new friends, and do something special with our lives, something that doesn't suck. How will we get through it? What will it take? I'm sure you have questions and concerns about the future, but at the end of the day, the only question that matters is this: Are humans together strong?

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter. I hope you enjoy the next one.

Yours til the end,
Baldous Gates


ADDENDUM: BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF PRINCIPLES FOR AI SAFETY

1. Distributed means spreading decision making capacity to more people and compute power to more physical locations. In other words, more people need to be involved in deciding how AI will be developed and used, and more people will own smaller subsystems containing compute capacity. This makes it less likely the system as a whole will be used for nefarious purposes while making it more resilient to outside attack.

2. Limited means moderating physical hardware capacity as well as model use cases. In other words, we need to limit the amount of compute and memory capacity available to individual AI models and limit what these models can be used for. Doing this reduces the possibility of a rogue superintelligence and also the possibility that a rogue AI will, for instance, launch a nuclear missle.

3. Transparent means requiring open source development and open models as well as public disclosure of who is using what AI models and how they are being used. With appropriate transparency, everyone has a chance to observe, comment on, and fix AI systems, and the potential for abuse of such systems is limited.

[Note: "Safe" super intelligence is not possible in the near future. The more powerful the AI is, the less we can control it. That is axiomatic. The only people capable of attempting to create a safe super intelligence are the smartest, wisest people living within a society that has eliminated war and poverty. That is because AI inevitably reflects the people developing it. We are simply not ready. It would benefit us much more to focus on fixing our society rather than fixing AI.

It's important to note I'm not some luddite intent on blocking technological progress. Even so, I'd support a temporary ban on AI development and use until we figure out how to do it responsibly. However, given that the basic technology is widely available and in use, I don't think a ban is realistic or makes sense. For example, how would we enforce it? Would we fine or jail people for using it on their personal computer? The only thing that makes sense is to regulate and limit it just enough to avoid misuse and catastrophic consequences.]

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