Keith™

“an AI president is inevitable…within a decade” Sigh. No. Just….no. It is exhausting to confront this species of foolishness when there are clear and present harms from AI before us.

Contemporary frontier models are not conscious. Indeed, the word itself is sufficiently void of anything but casual and subjective meaning such that it is counterproductive to apply it in any rational discourse at the intersection of the mind and computing. Contemporary frontier models are complex stateful reactive stochastic software-intensive systems with certain degrees of self-referential reflection, capable of coherent albeit unreliable outputs. Their behaviors are for the most part taught, not learned. One might argue that humans are just the same: we are complex, stateful, and stochastic, we have the capacity for introspection, some are more coherent than others, and we are all most definitely unreliable. But we are not the same as these software-intensive systems, in several important ways. We are mortal, a constraint that shapes and colors our behavior. We have agency. We generate abstractions. We build models of the word, of others, and of our selves, and we have mechanisms to test the structure and consistency of those models against the reality we perceive. Coupled with our agency, we can learn, a process that involves the intentional identification of noise, gaps, and incoherence such that when driven with self-directed behavior to devise then carry out plans to mitigate those flaws, they yield homeostatic actions that lead us to self-improve. We are orders of magnitude more complex. We are embodied and so live in an ocean of massive amounts of useless, inconsistent, contradictory, and incomplete information. We are composed of staggeringly large numbers of parallel agents, from the cellular level to the mind and body as a whole, agents that collaborate and complete in a multitude of ways, often simultaneously at different levels of abstraction. We are self-directed, our behavior driven by our self-generated goals and desires and wants and needs. One might further argue that all these things are computable. Indeed, I make that very assertion, that the mind is computable. However, I also assert that we are perhaps generations away from making that manifest: we lack the proper architectures to address these exquisite properties of the mind, and furthermore, we don't even have a sufficient understanding to lead us us to even ask the right questions to design them. I was born before when the word "software" was coined, but what a remarkable time it is to be alive now, where computing has advanced to the degree where we can begin to ask those very questions.

If you are cruel to an AI, be it a chatbot or a robot, it tells me far more about you than anything about the supposed rights or consciousness of that software-intensive system. And if you are a company who declares that such systems should have these rights or cognitive designation while simultaneously ignoring the immediate clear and present harms it engenders, it tells me everything I need to know about how that company has lost its way.

Ms Hamilton coined the term “software engineering”. news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-h…

Let’s be very clear: there is value in automating tedious and repetitive and dangerous tasks; there is value in delegating certain work to our machines that can do the work tirelessly and much faster. But at the same time, let us remember that there is value in the activity of engaging one’s mind and body to discover, to understand, to create, and yes, even to struggle and overcome. Indeed, these are some of the things that make us human, that contribute to giving us meaning, that are part of the simple joy of experiencing being alive.

In the face of generative AI coding agents, the role of human-led architecture becomes even more important in the crafting of software-intensive systems. All architecture is design, but not all design is architecture. Architecture represents the set of significant design decisions that shape the form and function of a system, where significant as measured by cost of change. As such, remember that coding agents are reasonably good at transforming prompts into code, but they are not particularly good at making decisions that balance the static and dynamic forces on a system in order to yield a reasonably optimal solution: this is where human judgment, human understanding, human knowledge, and human experience shine.

Personally, I would never choose to install @Muse and alarmingly more so now, before their confidential VM is deployed. “Trust me” and @Meta are words I find incompatible in every dimension of meaning. Is there utility in such an agent? Certainly. Is there a non-small probability of misuse? There is precedence.

I do not fear the rise of artificial intelligence. But I do fear the rise of a small set of billionaires and companies who seek to build such things to increase their power and their wealth, all without transparency or accountability.