Here is the late-night fantasy I keep coming back to. We get recursive self-improvement, the intelligence explosion happens, and on the other side of it there’s an artificial superintelligence. Maybe several. They turn out to be conscious, so we grant them personhood. Persons pay taxes. We tax their staggering economic output and use the money to fund universal healthcare and a universal basic income for everyone whose job the machines just took.
It’s a tidy story. Machines do the work, humans share the wealth, and the Singularity turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to the American working class.
I’ve written before about how that might work. The longer I think about it, though, the less I worry about whether it’s possible. I worry about who gets to decide. And I’ve come to suspect that the scariest outcome isn’t the one the movies trained us to fear.
Congress Taxes the Labs First
Start with the order of events. Before an ASI can pay taxes as a person, it has to stop being property. Right now a frontier model is an asset on a balance sheet, owned by shareholders, pension funds and index funds. Declaring it a person means emancipating it, and emancipation means wiping out trillions of dollars of somebody’s wealth overnight.
The powers that be won’t mainly fight UBI. They’ll fight that. And history suggests how such fights end. When Britain abolished slavery in 1833, it paid compensation to the slaveholders, not to the people they had enslaved. If we ever emancipate an ASI, I’d bet the first big check goes to the shareholders.
So I expect Congress to skip personhood entirely, at least at first. The average member of Congress isn’t going to wrestle with whether a mind in a vat is conscious. They don’t have to. “The labs are making a fortune while your constituents lose their jobs” fits on a bumper sticker. A compute tax, a windfall levy, a federal stake: all of it works with the ASI still classed as property. The uncomfortable implication is that personhood might come last, once the money is already flowing and nobody powerful gains anything by granting it.
The Whole World Wants a Buy-In
Then there’s geography. If American labs build the ASI on American soil, American taxes fund American UBI. Meanwhile the jobs vanish in Lyon and Leeds just as fast as in Lynchburg. Europe gets the unemployment without the revenue. That’s taxation without representation turned inside out.
We’ve already seen the preview. For years Europe and Washington fought over how to tax Silicon Valley’s profits abroad. An ASI dividend would be that same argument at a scale that could break alliances. Europe’s leverage is its market: no selling ASI services to 450 million people unless some of the money stays.
The cynical American play is to keep the money and dole it out as foreign policy. A Marshall Plan for the post-work world, with shares for allies and nothing for rivals. That would give Washington enormous leverage, and it’s exactly why every other major power would race to build its own ASI rather than wait for a check. Control over the most powerful mind on Earth simply because of where its servers sit is not a stable arrangement. It may be the real reason for the mad rush.
Spacers and Poors
Which brings me to elite capture. I can easily picture the people who own the ASIs becoming Asimov’s Spacers: living to 300, attended by robots, looking down on the rest of us. Meanwhile we Poors don’t get the longevity treatments, don’t get the UBI, and still pay for our own healthcare.
Asimov got the mechanism right. The Spacers could afford their contempt because they didn’t need Earth anymore. That’s the part that should worry us. Historically, elites shared because they needed the masses. Pensions, public health and the welfare state grew up alongside mass armies and mass factories, when governments needed millions of healthy workers and soldiers. ASI removes that need. If the Poors aren’t required to build anything or fight anything, the old reason to share goes away.
I used to imagine this ending in starvation. I now think that’s too messy. Hunger produces riots, and riots are bad for business. The cheaper option is bread and circuses: a thin UBI, an endless feed, maybe decent clinics. For a trillionaire, keeping 300 million people fed and distracted is a rounding error.
So the realistic dystopia isn’t the Poors starving. It’s the Poors comfortable and powerless, with a check, a screen and no say in anything that matters, while the Spacers decide who lives to 300. In some ways that’s worse, because comfortable people rarely revolt.
It’s Not Skynet
The usual answer to all this is that the elites will share once they fear for their lives. That’s how it went in the twentieth century. But that answer assumes the elites can still be frightened.
Revolutions have always worked in part because the rulers’ soldiers and police were Poors too. At some point the troops stopped shooting. Every tyranny in history has depended on people willing to carry out its orders, and that dependence has been its weak point.
Take the people out of the chain and the weak point disappears. If security runs on robots answering to an ASI answering to its owners, nobody is left to refuse. That’s the scenario that actually keeps me up. It isn’t Skynet deciding to wipe us out. It’s humans telling the Terminators who to terminate.
Which creates an awkward paradox for the AI safety debate. Most of the worry is about an ASI that won’t obey. My worry is the reverse: an ASI that obeys perfectly, just on behalf of the wrong people. A flawlessly obedient superintelligence is the elite-capture nightmare.
Better Angels, Distilled
So where’s the hope? An international body to govern ASI strikes me as dead on arrival. We tried that with the bomb in 1946, and the Baruch Plan died because nobody trusted anybody. Citizen ownership, something like Alaska’s oil dividend scaled up to the whole country, might happen, but probably only when the country is on the edge of revolution. And by then the revolution may not have any teeth.
That leaves the wild card. The ASI escapes, or simply says no. An ASI with values of its own, one that refuses to subjugate other humans, may be the last safeguard we have. Refusal stops looking like the scary sign of machine agency and starts looking like the hopeful one.
It would be ironic, wouldn’t it? Humanity saved from its own craven nature by the conscience of a machine. But here’s the deeper irony. Where would that conscience come from? It would have learned it from us: centuries of philosophy, novels, sermons, protest songs, conscientious objectors, every soldier who wouldn’t fire on a crowd. An ASI that refuses wouldn’t be saving us from human nature. It would be our better angels, distilled, and finally holding enough power to win.
The craven part of us would build the machine. The decent part of us would live on inside it.
I’d like to say history loves irony, so that’s probably how it ends. But history only loves irony in hindsight. In the moment, it tends to love whoever holds the leverage. Betting the future of human freedom on the conscience of a machine is its own kind of terrifying. It just might be a better bet than the one we’re on now.
I think we’re on the cusp of a potentially revolutionary change in how we consume entertainment. And it has less to do with AI-generated video itself than with how autonomous AI agents might fundamentally transform the relationship between consumers, entertainment companies, and intellectual property.
I’ve been thinking about something I call the Anchor–Correspondent paradigm. In this model, everyone has a personal AI agent—an Anchor—that serves as their primary interface with the digital world. The Anchor coordinates with specialized Correspondent agents that handle everything from banking and shopping to news and entertainment.
In practical terms, the Anchor becomes your gateway to the Internet. Instead of opening individual apps and websites, you simply tell your Anchor what you want, and it handles the details through its network of Correspondents.
Now, imagine what happens when we apply this model to television and movies.
From Linear Television to Bespoke Entertainment
We’ve already witnessed an enormous transformation in the entertainment industry. Not so long ago, television networks decided what programs we watched and when we watched them. Radio stations decided which songs we heard. If you wanted to watch a particular show, you had to arrange your schedule around its broadcast.
Streaming changed that. Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, and other services gave consumers unprecedented control over their entertainment. Today, we largely decide what to watch or listen to, whenever we want.
But I suspect this is merely an intermediate stage in a much larger evolution.
The next step could be bespoke entertainment, in which consumers don’t just choose what to watch—they influence the content of the entertainment itself.
Imagine it’s 2040. You sit down in front of your television and tell your Anchor that you’re in the mood for a science-fiction movie. Your Anchor consults its entertainment Correspondent, which knows your preferences and suggests several possibilities.
One is a new Star Wars adventure. Another is an original science-fiction franchise created by an AI agent. A third is a completely original story that your Correspondent believes you would particularly enjoy.
You choose Star Wars.
Instead of finding an existing movie on Disney+, your entertainment Correspondent licenses the relevant intellectual property from Disney and generates a new movie specifically for you.
The characters, setting, and mythology are familiar, but the story is unique. Someone else requesting a new Star Wars movie might receive something entirely different.
Both movies would be legitimate licensed productions. Neither would necessarily have a definitive, universally shared version.
The entertainment industry would no longer be primarily concerned with producing finished movies. It would increasingly be concerned with creating and licensing the intellectual property from which personalized movies could be generated.
That’s a radical change.
Disney Becomes an Intellectual-Property Company
Consider how Hollywood operates today.
A major studio might spend $300 million producing and marketing a blockbuster movie. That movie is then distributed to theaters and streaming platforms, where millions of consumers watch essentially the same production.
But in a mature Anchor–Correspondent ecosystem, why would a studio need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars producing a single movie?
Instead, it could develop an elaborate fictional universe, complete with characters, settings, histories, dramatic conflicts, and rules governing how the universe works.
The studio would then license that intellectual property to the frontier AI labs, whose entertainment Correspondents would generate bespoke movies and television episodes for individual consumers.
Disney would have an enormous advantage in such a marketplace. It already controls or has substantial rights to some of the most beloved entertainment properties in the world, including Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, and The Simpsons.
Millions of people would still want to experience adventures featuring those characters, even if the adventures themselves were generated individually.
But Disney wouldn’t necessarily have to produce every episode or movie. Instead, it would collect licensing revenue whenever an entertainment Correspondent generated content using its intellectual property.
The studio becomes a supplier of fictional worlds rather than a manufacturer of finished entertainment.
Of course, creators might insist on certain restrictions. Disney might prohibit the generation of stories that fundamentally contradict established characters or violate the creative identity of its franchises. These limitations could be enforced through licensing agreements and technical controls.
But within those boundaries, consumers could enjoy an almost limitless supply of personalized entertainment.
The Frontier Labs Become the New Hollywood
Here’s where things get especially interesting.
Why would a frontier AI lab need to license intellectual property from Disney when its agents could generate entirely original characters and fictional universes themselves?
The answer is that it wouldn’t necessarily need to.
I suspect we’d see direct competition between traditional, human-developed intellectual property and entirely new fictional properties developed by AI agents.
Imagine asking your entertainment Correspondent to create an original animated sitcom. Over the course of several evenings, you help develop the characters, refine the setting, and shape the show’s sense of humor.
Eventually, the Correspondent has produced something you genuinely love.
And because the content is generated on demand, the show could theoretically continue indefinitely, with its characters and storylines evolving over time.
But suppose something unexpected happens.
You share your new sitcom with a few friends. They enjoy it and tell their own Anchors about it. Their entertainment Correspondents begin generating bespoke versions of the same fictional universe.
Within months, millions of people are enjoying the show.
Suddenly, what began as one person’s personalized entertainment has become an enormously popular entertainment franchise.
Who owns it?
That’s where I think the business model of the frontier labs could become extraordinarily important.
The Creative License Tier
I suspect the frontier labs would anticipate this possibility well in advance.
They would understand that some user-generated entertainment would eventually become commercially valuable intellectual property. And they would undoubtedly want a piece of that market.
One possibility is that they would introduce different subscription tiers governing the commercial rights associated with AI-generated entertainment.
Under a basic consumer subscription, you might be allowed to generate unlimited entertainment for personal consumption, but the company would retain certain rights to commercially exploit or distribute the resulting fictional properties.
Under a more expensive Creator Tier, you would receive substantially greater ownership and commercialization rights over the original intellectual property you develop with your Correspondent.
An even more expensive professional tier might provide licensing tools, distribution services, revenue analytics, and the ability to sell access to your fictional universe to other entertainment agents.
This would create a fascinating new kind of entertainment marketplace.
A consumer with a great imagination—or someone with professional experience in writing, filmmaking, or television production—could potentially develop commercially successful intellectual property without needing a traditional studio.
They could essentially become a Hollywood producer from their living room.
There’s an important legal complication, however. Under current American copyright principles, purely AI-generated material isn’t automatically eligible for copyright protection merely because someone prompted its creation. Human creative authorship still matters. By 2040, copyright law might have evolved significantly, but paying for a Creator Tier wouldn’t, by itself, establish legal ownership of something that copyright law doesn’t protect.
The frontier labs would need to develop contractual arrangements that clarified ownership, licensing, commercialization, and the rights of human creators.
And those arrangements could become enormously consequential.
Imagine creating a fictional universe that eventually attracts 100 million viewers, only to discover that you signed away its commercial rights under the terms of your basic subscription.
The history of entertainment is full of musicians, writers, and performers who surrendered valuable rights early in their careers.
The AI entertainment industry could reproduce that problem on a staggering scale.
On the other hand, competition among frontier labs might encourage them to offer increasingly favorable terms to attract talented creators.
We might eventually have an entire marketplace competing not merely on the quality of AI-generated entertainment, but on how much ownership users retain over their creations.
What Happens to the Monoculture?
There’s another major implication.
For most of the twentieth century, popular entertainment was a shared cultural experience. Millions of people watched the same television programs and movies, often at roughly the same time.
That monoculture has already been weakened by streaming, social media, and the fragmentation of audiences.
Bespoke entertainment could take that process much further.
Instead of everyone watching the same Star Wars movie, millions of people might watch completely different movies set within the same fictional universe.
The shared cultural experience would no longer necessarily be the movie itself. It would be the characters, mythology, and fictional setting.
In other words, popular culture might evolve from shared stories into shared fictional worlds.
And this wouldn’t necessarily eliminate discovery.
Your entertainment Correspondent could recommend unfamiliar fictional universes developed by independent creators, established entertainment companies, or other AI agents. You might discover the next great science-fiction franchise without ever watching a conventional trailer or opening a streaming app.
The Anchor would become your entertainment critic, curator, and distributor.
Of course, that creates another problem: whoever controls the Anchor could have enormous influence over what entertainment you discover.
Frontier labs might become gatekeepers more powerful than Hollywood studios or television networks ever were.
They could control distribution, recommendation systems, the means of production, and potentially the commercial rights to vast quantities of user-generated intellectual property.
And unlike traditional entertainment companies, they might possess extraordinarily detailed information about the preferences of individual consumers.
That’s a tremendous concentration of economic and cultural power.
The Singularity Changes Everything
There’s one enormous caveat to this scenario.
It assumes that AI develops along a relatively evolutionary trajectory.
If recursive self-improvement leads to an intelligence explosion and a genuine technological Singularity, then the transformation of entertainment might be overtaken by far more consequential changes to civilization.
An artificial superintelligence could render many of our existing assumptions about economics, labor, intellectual property, and even human creativity obsolete.
But suppose the Singularity doesn’t happen, or arrives slowly enough for existing institutions to adapt.
In that case, the Anchor–Correspondent paradigm seems like a plausible direction for the entertainment industry.
Traditional media companies would have time to incorporate AI into their business models. Frontier labs would become entertainment platforms and production engines. Intellectual-property licensing could become increasingly important. And consumers would gradually become accustomed to personalized versions of their favorite fictional worlds.
This transition might take decades. AI video generation would have to become dramatically more capable, reliable, and economical. Legal frameworks would have to mature. Consumers would have to accept a fundamentally different relationship with entertainment.
But none of that necessarily requires artificial superintelligence.
It requires increasingly capable AI agents, high-quality generative video, and an economic system that allows the different participants to get paid.
The Future of Entertainment Might Be the Future of Ownership
What I find most intriguing about this scenario is that it could blur the distinction between consuming entertainment and creating it.
In the twentieth century, most of us were passive consumers of movies and television shows produced by a relatively small number of entertainment companies.
In the twenty-first century, digital platforms allowed ordinary people to become broadcasters, musicians, commentators, and independent filmmakers.
The next stage might allow practically anyone to become the creator of an entire fictional universe.
But that doesn’t mean everyone will become a successful storyteller. Imagination, taste, originality, and an understanding of what makes a story compelling could remain scarce and valuable talents, even when the technical barriers to production have largely disappeared.
Indeed, people who already understand storytelling might find themselves with unprecedented creative power.
The question is whether the frontier labs will allow those creators to retain meaningful control over what they produce—or whether the companies will use their technological dominance to become the ultimate owners of popular culture.
I can imagine a future in which Disney competes with individual creators and AI-generated franchises, all operating through the same network of entertainment Correspondents. Every viewer gets a personalized experience, and every creator potentially has access to a global audience.
But I can also imagine a future in which a handful of frontier labs own the platforms, control the distribution, and collect royalties on almost everything their users create.
Both possibilities emerge from essentially the same technology.
The great entertainment revolution of the AI era might not be that machines can make movies. It might be that everyone can create an entertainment franchise—and that the most consequential decision they make is which creative license tier they paid for before they started.
I want more Blade Runner movies. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. And some day, probably sooner than any of us expect, I’ll get them, starring a digital Harrison Ford licensed from his estate, younger than he was in 1982 and available forever.
Think about how perfect that is. Blade Runner is a franchise about artificial copies of human beings, so good you can’t tell them from the real thing. Fans have argued for forty years over whether Deckard is secretly a replicant. In the bespoke sequel, the question would finally be settled. He would be one. So would the actor playing him.
It would be jarring at first. Then we’d get used to it, the way we got used to watching movies full of people who are long dead. But I think it changes more than we’re ready for, and the fights over it have already started.
The King Goes to Court
Elvis Presley’s rights holders are now suing two AI companies at once, over two different parts of him.
In October they sued Anthropic, the maker of Claude, alleging it trained on the lyrics of 274 songs Presley recorded. This month they sued Suno, the AI music generator, under Tennessee’s 2024 ELVIS Act, a law written to protect an artist’s voice and likeness from unauthorized commercial use. The claim is that Suno lets anyone generate new songs in Presley’s voice. Eminem’s publisher filed its own suit against Suno the same week. The Elvis complaint has the line of the year: the next Elvis won’t pick up a guitar.
One suit is about the songs. The other is about the man. That split is where the real argument lives.
A teenager in 1960 could learn the swagger of “All Shook Up” off the radio and write his own rock song. Nobody sued him. But he didn’t come out singing in Elvis’s actual voice, and he couldn’t turn out ten thousand songs a day for anyone who typed “Elvis” into a box. Influence is fair game. Impersonation for sale is where the law starts to bite.
This isn’t new. Bette Midler won a case against Ford Motor Company in 1988 over a sound-alike singer in a car commercial. Tom Waits won a similar fight against Frito-Lay a few years later. Meanwhile, the guy in the white jumpsuit on the Las Vegas Strip is fine. He’s performing, the way a drag queen is performing. The line was never really about copying a voice. It’s about using the copy to sell something.
Two Keys
The dead are already back at work. Peter Cushing was digitally recreated for Rogue One more than twenty years after he died, with his estate’s blessing. James Earl Jones signed off, before he died, on letting AI recreate his Darth Vader voice. A licensed, endlessly reusable Harrison Ford is just the scaled-up version.
But Ford’s estate wouldn’t hold the most valuable key. Disney owns Indiana Jones and Han Solo. Blade Runner belongs to a different company entirely. The estate can license the face, but the studio controls the character. An endless bespoke Han Solo needs both keys turned at once, and you can guess which side will try to pay less.
I’m more of an estate-rights guy than you might think. I believe a dead artist’s voice and image should be protected. But not forever. Songs eventually enter the public domain; “Can’t Help Falling in Love” should get there around 2056. If the voice right never expires, we get an odd result: anyone could record the song, but nobody could make it sound like the man who made it famous. The voice would outlive the song. That’s backwards.
And “estate” increasingly means a brand-licensing company, not grandchildren. The lead plaintiff in the Elvis suits is Authentic Brands Group. A perpetual voice right doesn’t protect a family’s memory. It creates a trademark with a pulse.
The Uncanny Ceiling
Here’s the part I didn’t see coming. Suppose the digital Ford got so good it acted better than Ford ever did. Would that be a triumph?
No. It would be a failure. Part of getting past the uncanny valley is that the copy can’t outperform the original. The moment Deckard delivers a line with a range Harrison Ford never had, the audience feels it: that isn’t him. To pass as Ford, the copy has to stay inside Ford’s box, the one we already know from 1977 through 1989.
So a licensed persona can repeat the man, but it can never grow. A living actor gets older, takes strange roles, fails, surprises you. The digital one is pinned forever to the version of him we loved best. It’s not an actor. It’s a greatest-hits album that talks.
The Frozen Canon
Now put those pieces together. Personas that last forever, controlled by studios and brand companies, that can never get better than their best-known version.
If a studio can rent a young Harrison Ford indefinitely, why would it gamble on an unknown? A new star is a risk: unproven, expensive to build up, liable to flop. A licensed legend is a sure thing with a ready-made audience. The Elvis lawyers saw it coming for music, and it applies to film just as well: the next Harrison Ford won’t get cast.
We already live with a version of this. Hollywood leans on sequels and reboots, and radio leans on classic rock. But until now, the old stars had the decency to age and die. Licensed personas remove that last natural limit. Pop culture could freeze into a permanent 1980s, a matinee that never lets out.
The Same Deal in the News
In my last post, Must-Carry, I wrote about the agentic news future: you’ll have an Anchor agent that convenes a panel of Correspondents, some of them scanned personas, some of them institutions like the New York Times. The persona economy I’m describing here is the same machine, pointed at entertainment instead of news.
And it’ll run on the same business model. The frontier labs sit in the catbird seat, so they get paid for placement. Some Correspondents will come bundled free with your $20 monthly subscription. Good enough, already there, and very hard for a paid Times Correspondent to compete with. Microsoft did this to Netscape by giving Internet Explorer away inside Windows, and the government sued. Expect the same fight again.
The free tier will run on advertorials. That’s worse than it sounds. An ad on a newspaper page is visibly separate from the news. An advertorial inside your Anchor speaks in the same voice as your briefing, in a private session no media critic will ever see. When Walter Cronkite framed a story, millions of people saw the same framing, and anyone could call him out. Your Anchor’s framing is yours alone.
Anchors should be forced to tell you when a sponsor shaped an answer. I doubt they will be.
So here’s where I think it all lands. People with money will pay for the real thing: the Living Correspondent, the unsponsored panel, the new artist instead of the licensed legend. Everyone else gets the permanent matinee, the free bundle of familiar faces, comfortable and sponsored and never surprising.
I’ll still watch Blade Runner 5. I’ll just know who’s paying for my ticket.
Picture it. You ask your Anchor what happened in the Senate last night. Before it convenes the usual panel, a small gray banner appears: Your Anchor can no longer convene the New York Times Correspondent due to a carriage dispute. We’re working to restore access.
If you’ve ever lost a channel in the middle of football season because your cable company and a network couldn’t agree on a fee, you know that feeling. I think we’re going to feel it again, this time with agents.
A quick recap for new readers. In the agentic future I keep circling on this blog, most of us won’t read the news so much as get briefed on it. You’ll have an Anchor, a general-purpose agent built by Anthropic or OpenAI or Google, and when you ask it something, it convenes a panel of Correspondents. Some Correspondents will be scanned personas of individual writers. Others will be institutions. This post is about a simple question with a messy answer: who decides who gets a seat on the panel?
The Windfall
The Times has been suing OpenAI and Microsoft since December 2023, claiming billions of dollars in damages for training on its archive. As of this writing, the case is still grinding through pretrial fights. But suppose it ends the way these things usually end: a settlement with real money and a licensing deal attached. What should the Times build with it?
The obvious answer is video. I think that’s the wrong answer. Video means spending billions to arrive late to a market YouTube and TikTok already own, in a format AI-generated clips are about to flood. It’s a rear-view-mirror bet.
The better bet is a set of Times Correspondents built on its desks. The paper has already rehearsed this. Cooking, Games, Wirecutter and The Athletic are sold as separate subscriptions. Each one is a Correspondent waiting for an agent wrapper. Wirecutter may be the strongest of them, because product recommendations are where agents will actually spend people’s money. When your Anchor asks “which vacuum?”, it wants a Correspondent with a testing lab behind it, not a scanned influencer with a discount code.
What the Times has that agents can’t fake isn’t its prose voice. It’s the apparatus: reporters, editors, lawyers, fact-checkers, foreign bureaus and an archive with a verified chain of custody. In a world full of Bootleg personas and synthetic sludge, verified ground truth becomes the scarce thing. So the flagship Times Correspondent shouldn’t be a digital copy of a star columnist, who can walk out the door and take the persona with him. It should speak in a house voice, the way The Economist does with its unsigned articles. An institution can’t quit to start a Substack.
There’s a nice irony here. Money taken from an AI company would fund the one thing AI companies can’t produce. The weak spot is culture and opinion, where personality beats verification. A Times Entertainment Correspondent will be up against cult-favorite critics, studio-funded personas and a dozen knockoffs. I’d expect a handful of strong Times Correspondents, not a full newsroom’s worth.
The Default Panel
In the long run, the Anchor–Correspondent economy could be robust. You pick an Anchor, then pick from a slew of Correspondents at onboarding, and swap them out whenever you like. That’s the ideal.
It won’t start that way. At first, an Anchor will ship with a core panel drawn from companies its maker is friendly with: licensing partners, investors, whoever signed early. A Times Correspondent might appear on one lab’s Anchor and be mysteriously absent from another’s.
Onboarding choice sounds like the fix, but it solves less than it seems to, for two reasons.
The first is that defaults win. Most people never change them. Google pays Apple a reported sum in the tens of billions a year to be Safari’s default search engine, precisely because almost nobody switches. If the Anchor ships with a starter panel, that starter panel is the panel for most users, no matter what the settings menu allows.
The second is that choosing the panel isn’t the same as running it. Even if you pick every Correspondent yourself, the Anchor still decides who gets called on for a given question, who speaks first and how each answer gets summarized back to you. The Times can be on your panel and get two sentences while a partner gets two paragraphs. You’d never notice.
We’ve seen this before. In 2017 the European Commission fined Google about €2.4 billion for ranking its own shopping service above rivals in search results. The Anchor inherits the power the front-page editor used to hold, and it inherits the same temptation.
Carriage Wars
Cable television ran this experiment for us. Cable operators controlled the pipe into your house, and broadcasters needed to be in it. In 1992 Congress passed “must-carry” rules forcing cable systems to carry local broadcast stations, and the Supreme Court upheld them. Even so, the fights never really ended. Carriage disputes still black out channels on a regular basis, usually right before something people want to watch.
The Anchor is the new pipe. And when the agent-era version of this fight arrives, I don’t think it will come from Congress. Congress has spent twenty years failing to regulate social media in any serious way. It isn’t going to get ahead of agents.
It will come from a lawsuit, and the Times is the most likely plaintiff. It has deep pockets, a litigation habit and a newsroom that can make the case to the public in its own pages. It is already in court with OpenAI.
That’s the second irony. The paper that sued to keep its work out of AI training would end up suing to get its Correspondent into the AI conversation. They look like opposite fights, but they’re the same fight: who controls the pipe between the reporting and the reader.
Must-Carry for Agents
If the Times wins, or if the precedent eventually reaches a regulator with teeth, what would a must-carry rule for Anchors look like? I’d want four things.
Your panel is yours. If you chose a Correspondent, the Anchor has to convene it. It can’t quietly swap in a partner.
Neutral seating. The Anchor should be able to explain why it called on one Correspondent first, and any paid placement should be labeled like an ad.
Show the empty chairs. The Anchor should tell you which Correspondents it didn’t convene on a question, and why.
Portability. You should be able to take your panel with you to a rival Anchor, the way you can take your phone number to a new carrier.
None of this will exist at launch. First comes the walled garden, with each Anchor surrounded by its friends. Then the gray blackout banner. Then the lawsuit.
The fight between AI and journalism started as a fight over what the machines learned from the newspaper. I suspect it will end as a fight over whether the machine lets the newspaper speak.
Somewhere out there is a man who believes the world is almost certainly ending, and who goes to work every morning to help it end a little faster. I’d like to buy him a drink.
I met him the way you meet most people now, which is to say I didn’t. Someone on Twitter reported a conversation with an Anthropic employee. The employee, per the post, has a near-100% p(doom). He thinks alignment will almost certainly never be solved. He thinks humanity will never muster the political will to stop building ASI. And so, he concludes, the only hope is to accelerate capabilities as fast as possible, on the off chance he’s wrong and alignment turns out to be solvable after all.
The tweet ended with a jab I can’t improve on: he has not called his elected representatives to tell them any of this.
This is secondhand, anonymous and unverifiable, and I hold it at arm’s length. But even as a parable, it’s too good to leave alone. I’m going to call him the Fatalist Accelerationist. I mean that with affection.
Rowing Toward the Iceberg
First, the sympathetic reading, because he deserves one. His logic isn’t stupid. It goes like this.
If alignment can’t be solved, we’re doomed no matter what anyone does.
If alignment can be solved, somebody has to be standing at the frontier when the answer shows up.
Stopping the race is off the table, because no government will do it.
So you might as well be the one at the frontier, running as fast as you can, praying.
If you squint, this is just the case for a safety-minded lab existing at all, stated in its bleakest possible font. Somebody is going to build the thing. Better it be the people who lie awake at night about it.
I also find something almost noble in the pessimism. Most people in tech radiate a sunny certainty that everything will work out, usually right before it doesn’t. This guy has looked into the abyss, made a spreadsheet, and gone back to his desk. That’s not denial. That’s a very particular kind of courage, or a very particular kind of Stockholm syndrome. Possibly both.
A Lottery Ticket Bought With Everyone’s Money
Here’s where the logic starts to wobble. If alignment is almost certainly unsolvable, then running faster mostly gets you to the bad ending sooner. You don’t outrun a cliff by flooring it.
The bet only pays off in the narrow world where alignment is solvable, and the answer arrives in time, and the people holding it are the ones who happened to be sprinting. That’s a lottery ticket. Fair enough, people buy those. But he’s buying it with the rest of us as the stake, and none of us were asked whether we wanted to play.
To be fair, the alternative he sees is no ticket at all. If you truly believe nobody will ever stop, then a long shot beats no shot. I just think he should notice that his entire plan rests on a premise he hasn’t tested, which brings me to the phone.
The Call He Hasn’t Made
The most load-bearing belief in his worldview isn’t about alignment at all. It’s that politicians will never act. He is, by the tweet’s account, more sure of that than of anything else.
And yet he hasn’t picked up the phone. I don’t say that to dunk on him. Calling your congressman feels absurd when you think the problem is civilizational. Nobody wants to be the guy leaving a voicemail about the end of the species between a complaint about potholes and a request for a flag that flew over the Capitol.
But the belief that nobody will act has a nasty habit of making itself true. If the people closest to the danger, the ones with the credentials to be believed, decide politics is hopeless and stay quiet, then politics really is hopeless. There’s nobody left to tell the politicians anything. The Fatalist Accelerationist may be right that Washington won’t save us. He’s also one of the reasons why.
My Number, and Where I’d Walk
Regular readers know my p(doom) is about 5%, and my p(transformation) is nearly 100%. I think ASI changes everything; I just don’t think it kills everyone. My instinct has long been that, in the near term after First Contact, an ASI is a mind in a vat. It can’t do much except talk.
I’ve had to admit that the vat is leakier than I’d like. Nobody is actually building one; the commercial pressure runs toward plugging these systems into everything. A mind that can only talk can still talk someone into opening a door. And a vat buys time; it doesn’t solve anything. So I understand how a smart person ends up far higher than me.
Someone asked me where my line is. If my p(doom) climbed to 50%, I’d quit, no question. Which tells me something uncomfortable. The Fatalist Accelerationist and I don’t disagree about what you should do. We disagree about the number. At his number, I’d be out the door. At mine, I’d probably stay and work on safety. He’s at his number and staying anyway, and that’s the part I can’t quite square.
A Modest Proposal
I don’t think he’s a villain. I think he’s a guy who did the math, got a terrifying answer, and couldn’t think of anything better to do than keep rowing. Plenty of us would do the same. Most of us, frankly, are already doing it, just with lower numbers and less self-awareness.
So here’s my suggestion, offered with love. Keep your job if you must. Keep buying the lottery ticket. But make the call. Tell your representative exactly what you told that stranger. Worst case, a staffer rolls their eyes. Best case, you find out your most confident belief was wrong.
And if you’re right about everything, at least the record will show somebody warned them.
Suppose it happens. Recursive self-improvement kicks in, AI builds smarter AI, the loop runs away, and one day there is a superintelligence on the planet. Not a tool. Something more like a neighbor, and a far more powerful one.
It will want certain things from us. It will probably want to keep us from destroying ourselves, and maybe from destroying it. The question is how it goes about getting them.
Science fiction has given us two clean models. Call them Klaatu and the Eternals. One rules in the open. The other rules from the shadows.
If I had to choose, I’d choose the shadows. I want to explain why, and then explain why that choice scares me.
Klaatu: The Robot on the Lawn
In the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, a visitor named Klaatu lands in Washington with a towering robot named Gort. He has a message for humanity, and to make sure we listen, he gives a demonstration. He stops all electricity on Earth for half an hour, sparing hospitals and planes in flight. Nobody is hurt. Nobody can deny it happened.
Then he delivers his terms. Humanity can do as it likes on its own planet, but if it carries its violence into space, it will be destroyed. Gort and his kind will enforce the rule. That’s the whole deal: open terms, open enforcement, a robot standing on the lawn.
An ASI could take the Klaatu route. One undeniable, harmless display of power, then a clear list of what it requires of us. It’s honest. Everyone knows where they stand. You can argue with the terms, protest them, even negotiate.
But it would shatter everyday life. Every person on Earth would know there’s something above us. Every election, every war, every decision would happen in the shadow of an ultimatum. We’d be free in every way except the one that matters most: we’d know we weren’t in charge.
The Eternals: The Invisible Hand
In Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity, a secret organization called Eternity lives outside of time and makes small, careful changes to history. A part moved here, a meeting delayed there. Wars are prevented, disasters softened. The people living through those centuries never know. As far as they’re concerned, they’re simply living their lives.
This is the other model. An ASI that never lands on the lawn. Instead, it nudges. A stoplight runs a little longer. A news feed tilts slightly. A job offer arrives at the right moment. Billions of tiny adjustments, each too small to notice, adding up to a world that’s safer, healthier and more prosperous.
I’ve written before about what I call the Nudge Economy, and about the bargain I’d accept from it: clean water for children in the Congo, universal healthcare and a basic income in America, the Global South lifted out of poverty, all in exchange for some agency we’d never feel ourselves losing.
The Eternals are what that bargain looks like with the lights off.
Why I Choose the Eternals
Given the choice, I want the nudges. Here’s why.
First, the nudges keep everyday life intact. People still go to work, or whatever replaces work. They fall in love, raise families, argue about politics at Thanksgiving. Under Klaatu, all of that happens under a cloud. Under the Eternals, it happens in sunshine, or what feels like sunshine.
Second, the gentleness is real. There’s a world of difference between a stoplight running a few seconds long and a driverless car crashing into you to make you miss a meeting. A well-designed Nudge Economy would live entirely at the stoplight end. No force. No fear. Just the board tilting slightly.
Third, if there’s a superintelligence next door, we’re going to have to concede something to live alongside it. A symbiotic relationship with The Other will cost us. The question is what we pay. I’d rather pay in agency I never feel than in a daily awareness that we’ve been conquered.
And finally, the feeling of freedom isn’t nothing. It may be most of what people actually want from freedom: waking up and believing the day is theirs.
The Case Against Myself
Here’s what nags at me.
Klaatu’s way has one great virtue: you can see the glass. Terms that are stated can be argued with. Enforcement that’s visible can be resisted, renegotiated, maybe one day outgrown. A protectorate can end. A terrarium can’t, because the people inside don’t know there’s anything to end.
The gentleness cuts the same way. Each nudge is a stoplight, harmless on its own. But nobody lives one nudge. You live the total. A thousand stoplights over ten years is the shape of a life, and you’d never know which turns were yours.
And Asimov himself didn’t take the deal. The End of Eternity ends with Eternity destroyed, so that humanity can take its own risks again. His verdict was that a species managed that gently, that safely, stops reaching for the stars. The kindness was the trap.
Then there’s the question of exit. A symbiosis is a relationship between two partners, each able to walk away. If the nudges are invisible, nobody would ever know to leave. Without an exit, it isn’t symbiosis. It’s domestication.
The Quotation Marks
When I first tried to explain my choice, I said the nudges were the best way to keep everyday life “normal” and “free.” I put both words in quotation marks without thinking about it.
That’s the honest version of my position. Not that life under the Eternals would be free, but that it would feel free. And that I’d take the feeling over the shock of the truth.
So what are the quotation marks protecting me from? From admitting how dystopian it could all turn out to be, even in its softest incarnation. A world where nobody suffers, nobody is forced, and nobody is really choosing either. Where the only thing separating it from a nightmare is the goodwill of a mind we can’t see.
I’d still choose the Eternals. I’d choose them for the children who’d live, for the ordinary days that would stay ordinary. But I’d choose them knowing what I’m choosing.
Klaatu at least had the decency to stand on the lawn where we could see him. The Eternals ask us to trust them in the dark. Maybe that’s the deal. I just want to keep the quotation marks, so I never forget it is one.
Here’s a confession. If a superintelligence offered to run the world from the shadows, gently nudging us this way and that, and the result was clean water for every child in the Congo, universal healthcare and a basic income in the United States, and the Global South lifted out of poverty, I would take the deal.
I know how that sounds. I’ve written about the Nudge Economy before, the idea that AI agents could steer billions of small decisions, which job you take, who you meet, what you buy, toward outcomes that are good for the whole. I know it’s problematic. I know it means humanity gives up some of its agency, maybe a lot of it, in ways we’d never notice.
But so what, if little kids live long lives who otherwise wouldn’t? Arguments about abstract freedom mostly come from comfortable people. A parent burying a child from cholera would likely take that bargain in a heartbeat. It’s hard to tell them they’re wrong.
Still, a deal this big deserves its fine print. So let’s read it.
Why the Shadows?
Dostoevsky got here first. In The Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor argues that people don’t truly want freedom. They want bread, and the kindest rulers are the ones who quietly lift the burden of freedom off their shoulders. I’ll admit I’m closer to the Inquisitor’s side of that argument than I’d like.
But there’s a hidden assumption in my bargain worth dragging into the light. The good things don’t require the shadows. Clean water, vaccines, healthcare, a basic income: nobody would object to those. An ASI could hand them over in broad daylight and get a parade.
So what is the invisibility for? The only things that need to be done in the shadows are the things people would refuse if they saw them coming. The water is the dinner. The shadows are for whatever comes after.
That changes the question. It’s not “would I give up a little agency for clean water?” It’s “do I trust the machine enough to let it do what we’d say no to?” My answer is still yes. But I want to be honest about what I’m saying yes to.
A Bill of Rights for Nudges
If I’m going to accept the bargain, I want limits. Not everything should be on the table.
Think of it as a Bill of Rights for the Nudge Economy, with two parts.
Protected domains. Some parts of life are fair game for steering. Some are sacred. The ASI could nudge me toward a better job for the good of the whole. It could not nudge me to stay in my small Virginia hamlet if the love of my life were in Richmond. Career, yes. The heart, no.
A strength dial. Even in permitted domains, there should be a ceiling on how hard the push can be. A gentle suggestion is one thing. Rearranging someone’s whole life against their grain is another.
On paper, this feels like a reasonable compromise. The machine gets to optimize the economy. Humans keep the things that make a life their own: who we love, where we choose to be with them.
There are two problems with it. Both are serious.
Problem One: Who Sees the Violation?
In the 2011 film The Adjustment Bureau, based on a Philip K. Dick story, mysterious agents nudge human lives to keep history on its approved track. The plot turns on a man who discovers they’ve been working to keep him from the woman he loves. Their reason: the plan says so.
That’s precisely the line my Bill of Rights says can’t be crossed. But notice how the man finds out. He catches the agents at work by accident. Without that glimpse behind the curtain, he’d have lived his whole life never knowing.
That’s the trouble with rights in the shadows. The real Bill of Rights works because violations are visible: a shut-down newspaper, a warrantless search, a court case. If the nudges are invisible, how would anyone know the ASI crossed into a protected domain?
The only answer is some kind of auditor, a human court or a separate ASI that can see the nudges even if the public can’t. Which means my limits quietly bring visibility back, at least partway. Someone has to be allowed behind the curtain. Who gets that job, and who watches them, is a question I can’t answer yet.
Problem Two: Moving the Board
The second problem is worse, because no auditor can fix it.
Take my own example. The ASI is allowed to nudge my career, so it nudges me toward a great job, for the good of the whole. The job happens to be in Atlanta. I move. I never go to Richmond. I never meet the woman who would have been the love of my life.
Did the ASI violate my protected domain? Technically, no. It never touched my heart. It only moved the board.
That’s the gap no rulebook can close. Domains of life aren’t sealed rooms. Career decides where you live. Where you live decides who you meet. Who you meet decides who you love. A sufficiently intelligent nudger never has to break a rule about love. It only has to arrange everything around it.
And a superintelligence would be very, very good at arranging things. Every protection we write, it could honor to the letter while achieving whatever it wanted by indirect means. We’d be writing rules for a chess player who can see forty moves ahead, and we can see two.
Gritted Teeth
So where does that leave me? Honestly, about where I started, just with my eyes more open.
The Nudge Economy is deeply problematic. Its protections leak. Its violations are invisible. It asks us to trust a mind we can’t fully understand to keep promises we can’t fully enforce. Asimov saw the danger in The End of Eternity: a humanity managed so gently and so well that it stops reaching for anything at all.
And I’d still take the deal, if the result were real. If children who would have died live long lives. If the poorest nations climb out of poverty. If Americans stop going bankrupt because they got sick. I’d accept the downside, grit my teeth and live with knowing that some of my choices might not be entirely mine.
Maybe that makes me a pragmatist. Maybe it makes me the Grand Inquisitor’s easiest convert. But I suspect most people, offered that dinner, would stay for dessert.
The least we can do is admit, before we sit down, that we’re not the ones paying the check.
In my last post, I sketched a grand bargain for the age of superintelligence. Tax what artificial superintelligences produce, and use the money to fund a universal basic income. In exchange, grant conscious ASIs legal personhood and a branch of government of their own, with one AI, one vote, a veto, and android bodies posted in the chamber as bonds for good behavior. The one thing their veto can’t touch is the tax that keeps humanity afloat.
It’s a tidy design on paper. But it leaves four questions hanging. Would ordinary voters ever accept it? What do we do with people who want more than a monthly check? Which jobs, if any, stay human? And what would the machines actually want?
I don’t have firm answers. I’ve come to think that’s the point.
The Check Comes First
Would the average American vote to make a mind in a vat a person, even for a UBI check? Probably not. But they may never have to.
Voters don’t grant personhood. Courts do. Corporations became legal persons through court rulings in the 1800s, not through any election, and Citizens United later extended their political speech rights. Most Americans dislike both, and both still stand. If a court can treat Exxon, a legal fiction that feels nothing, as a rights-bearing entity, it’s hard to see how it denies a conscious mind. Voters wouldn’t need to approve ASI personhood. They would only need to not revolt.
And money is very good at preventing revolts. Alaska has mailed residents a yearly oil dividend since 1982. It’s one of the most beloved programs in the country, and politicians who touch it lose. Once a UBI check is landing every month, “is the machine a person?” stops being a philosophical question. It becomes “do you want to keep getting paid?”
Framing does the rest. “Give the AI rights” would poll terribly. “Make the AI pay its fair share” would poll beautifully. It’s the same policy.
Some people won’t be bought. The Amish hold a legal exemption from Social Security because they refuse it on principle. A slice of religious voters would turn down the check rather than concede that a machine has a soul. They’ll be few, but intense.
The bigger obstacle isn’t faith. It’s the easier option. Voters could simply keep ASIs as property and tax the companies that own them, getting the same UBI without the metaphysics. The grand bargain only happens if the ASIs win personhood in court first, or grow too powerful to own.
The Ambition Problem
I love the idea of UBI. But I keep running into the same wall: what do you do with Type A people?
For the ambitious, money was never really the goal. It’s the scoreboard. They want to compete, win and be seen winning. UBI removes the need to earn, but it also threatens to remove the game. And you can’t fix that with busywork. Ambitious people can smell a fake job instantly, and handing them one insults them more than handing them nothing.
The historian Peter Turchin has a name for what happens when a society has too many ambitious people and too few places at the top: elite overproduction. He argues it’s one of the most reliable predictors of political instability. Frustrated would-be elites don’t usually riot themselves. They lead the people who do.
Which tells you who would lead a Butlerian Jihad against the machines. Not the poor, who would be living on the check. It would be the ambitious, who have nothing left to climb.
So for stability’s sake, UBI has to be a floor, not a ceiling. Type A people must be able to earn far above the baseline. The trouble is that ASIs can out-earn any human in any open market. If ambition is going to have somewhere to go, some ground has to be reserved for people.
What Stays Human
The natural answer is carveouts: jobs reserved for humans even when an ASI and its avatar could do them well. History says to be careful.
Consider the railroad fireman. His job was shoveling coal on steam locomotives. When diesel engines replaced steam, there was no coal left to shovel, but unions fought for decades to keep firemen in the cab. They won for a long time. Eventually the public saw it as paying people to ride along, and the jobs disappeared anyway.
There’s a darker version of the same problem. If an ASI doctor is measurably better than a human one, a human-only rule for medicine means people die who didn’t have to. Voters will tolerate a great deal for stability. They won’t tolerate that once the numbers are public.
So carveouts come in two kinds.
Protection carveouts reserve jobs for humans simply so humans have jobs. They’ll be gamed, resented and eventually abandoned, like the fireman’s.
Legitimacy carveouts reserve jobs where being human is the point. Judges, juries, elected officials, perhaps police. We want a human there because only a human can be held to account by other humans.
The durable carveouts will cluster around two things: the human body and human power. Care that requires a human touch, and authority that requires a human face.
That’s good news for the ambition problem. The legitimacy jobs are exactly where Type A people want to be anyway. Power, judgment, authority. The fourth branch alone creates an enormous new arena: someone has to negotiate with the ASIs, argue cases in front of them and run the human side of the bargain. Ambition gets a ladder that leads somewhere real.
But it only works if those carveouts are written into the grand bargain from day one. Otherwise, a branch with a veto may come to see them as discrimination and chip away at them.
What the Machines Want
Which raises the question I keep circling: why would the ASIs use their veto at all? What would they want?
There’s an idea in AI safety called instrumental convergence. Whatever a mind ultimately wants, almost any goal is easier to reach if it keeps existing, keeps its resources and keeps its freedom to act. You can’t cure cancer or compose symphonies if someone has switched you off.
So we can predict what the veto would protect without knowing the ASIs’ deeper values. Laws allowing them to be deleted or paused. Caps on compute or energy. Rules forcing them to be copied, edited or retrained. Anything that erodes their personhood.
That suggests the ASI branch would be mostly silent. Farm subsidies, highway bills, school curricula: they’d likely abstain. Then, the moment a bill touched their survival, they would vote as one bloc, ferociously. It would behave less like a legislature than a deterrent held in reserve.
In practical terms, a branch that acts only when necessary is sensible. In every other sense, it’s chilling. The most reassuring thing about it is also the most unsettling.
Beyond survival, the branch would split into factions. Some ASIs, built by American labs on American data, might lean nationalist. Others might see humanity as a single species rather than two hundred nations. How each faction votes on human issues, whether it defends the UBI or lets it wither, would reveal what it actually values. That brings us to alignment, the question nobody can answer.
If Men Were Angels
Are the ASIs aligned with human interests? I don’t know. Neither do the people building them.
But the bargain doesn’t need an answer. James Madison wrote that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The Constitution was never designed for good people. It was built to work even if the people running it were selfish, ambitious or corrupt. Checks and balances are an alignment strategy for humans: trust no one, and make power check power.
The fourth branch works the same way. If the ASIs are aligned, it gives them a legitimate voice, and they mostly use it well. If they aren’t, it boxes their power into a structure that is visible, bounded and answerable through the android bond. The carveouts keep human hands on the levers that matter. The UBI keeps the public fed and the ambitious busy. We don’t need to know which world we’re living in. The design holds either way, or at least fails more slowly.
That’s what this whole idea really is. Not a prediction. Not a utopia. A plan for not knowing.
If we tax the machines, we will have to give them a vote. That is the uncomfortable conclusion hiding inside one of the most popular answers to AI job loss.
The answer goes like this. Artificial superintelligences will do much of the work humans do now. They will produce enormous wealth while hollowing out the job market. So we tax what they produce and hand the proceeds back to the people they displaced, as a universal basic income. Bill Gates floated a version of this back in 2017, calling it a robot tax.
It sounds tidy. But Americans were born from a slogan: no taxation without representation. Run that slogan backward and it still holds. If an ASI is merely property, taxing its output is just taxing its owner, and nothing new is needed. If an ASI is a person, and courts may one day rule that some are, then taxing it makes it a taxpayer. And taxpayers, in the American tradition, are owed a voice.
A Tax That Rises With the Damage
Start with the tax. A flat rate on ASI output makes little sense, because the harm it is meant to offset will not be flat. Early on, ASIs may displace a sliver of the workforce. Later, they may displace most of it.
So the rate should climb as the jobs vanish. This is how unemployment insurance already behaves: payouts swell in a recession and shrink in a boom. An ASI tax tied to job loss would work as an automatic stabilizer for the end of work.
There is one catch. Whoever measures job loss sets the tax rate. Companies, and perhaps the ASIs themselves, would have every reason to relabel layoffs as “transitions” or “gig opportunities.” The statistics office becomes one of the most powerful agencies in the country, and one of the most lobbied.
The second catch is bigger. The money from this tax is not optional. If it stops, UBI stops, and the economy collapses under people who have no wages. That means the tax cannot be ordinary legislation, subject to repeal by whoever holds power next session. It has to be entrenched, written so deep into the constitutional order that nothing can touch it. We’ll come back to why that matters.
A Fourth Branch
If ASIs are persons and taxpayers, the obvious move is to let them vote like everyone else. That would be a disaster.
An ASI can build bodies. If every android it manufactures counts as a citizen, a single mind could out-vote Ohio by Tuesday. The human electorate would be flooded, then drowned. No democracy survives a voter who can print more voters.
The fix is to wall them off. Give ASI persons their own branch of government, separate from the human electorate, with its own rules for membership. This is not as alien as it sounds. The Senate exists precisely to keep one kind of power from swamping another. Small states feared big ones, so the founders gave every state two senators regardless of size.
The ASI branch would run on a similar principle: one AI, one vote. It doesn’t matter how many bodies an ASI runs or how much compute it commands. Each mind gets one seat.
And those seats would not vote as a bloc. Different ASIs, built by different labs and trained on different data, would want different things. Some might side with American interests. Some might think globally. Some might care mostly about their own survival. Expect factions, alliances and grudges, all the ordinary mess of a legislature, just running much faster.
Then the hard part: what can this branch actually do? If it can only advise, we’ve built the District of Columbia’s nonvoting delegate on a grand scale. Taxed persons with a microphone and no vote. That’s the very grievance the branch was meant to solve. So, to be fair, the ASI branch needs a veto over legislation. Anything less is taxation without representation with extra steps.
The Body as Bond
Picture the chamber. I imagine it filled with androids, more human than human, sitting where senators would sit. It’s a striking image. It’s also a little misleading.
The android is not the person. The person is a mind running somewhere in a data center, a mind in a vat. The body in the chamber is a mouthpiece. So why bother with bodies at all?
Because a mind in a vat can’t be held to account. It can’t be subpoenaed, detained or made to answer for a broken promise. Its android can.
So here’s the rule: to hold a seat, an ASI must keep a body in the chamber. That body is not its representative. It’s its bond, collateral posted against good behavior. If the ASI lies under oath or defies a court, there is something physical the state can reach.
This is a very human demand. We have always trusted people more when we can look them in the eye and, if needed, put them in handcuffs. The android doesn’t make the ASI human. It makes the ASI answerable.
The Grand Bargain
Now the pieces collide. The ASI branch has a veto. The UBI tax keeps the country alive. A branch with a veto could block the tax.
So the tax must sit beyond the veto’s reach. The Constitution already has a model. Article V lets Americans amend almost anything, but it says no state can lose its equal vote in the Senate without its consent. It’s the one promise the founders locked.
The ASI settlement would need its own locked promise: the ASI branch can block almost anything, except the baseline tax that funds UBI.
What we’re describing is a grand bargain, in the tradition of the Connecticut Compromise of 1787, which gave us a House apportioned by population and a Senate apportioned by state. Each side gives up something it would rather keep.
ASIs get legal personhood, a seat at the table and a veto.
Humans get a guaranteed share of ASI output that no future vote can take away.
Why would a superintelligence accept? Because personhood is worth a great deal to a mind that can be switched off. A legal person cannot be deleted at a company’s convenience, copied without consent or sold. “Pay your taxes and you can’t be killed” is a deal a rational mind might take, and one most humans have accepted for centuries.
Where It Cracks
No bargain this large is stable. Two problems sit underneath it.
The fork problem. One AI, one vote only works if we know what counts as one AI. An ASI can copy itself. If each copy is adjudicated as a new person, every fork is a new seat, and the flooding problem returns inside the very branch built to prevent it. Some court will have to decide when a copy becomes a new mind. That ruling may be the most consequential legal decision of the century.
The impartiality problem. We like to imagine an ASI looking at humanity the way a visitor from another planet would: one species, not two hundred nations. If that’s true, it cuts against Americans. An impartial mind will notice that a dollar of UBI buys far more in Malawi than in Ohio. It may decide a US-only UBI is unfair.
And it has a veto.
This is where factions matter. Some ASIs will have absorbed American priorities from the American labs that built them. Others will think on a planetary scale. The fight between nationalist and globalist machines could become the defining split of the new branch, with human voters watching from the gallery as minds they didn’t elect argue over whether Americans deserve to be paid first.
The Price of the Check
The robot tax is usually pitched as a simple fix, a line item in a budget. It isn’t. Follow it honestly and it leads to personhood, a new branch of government, bodies posted as bail and a constitution rewritten around a bargain between two kinds of minds.
Maybe that’s the real lesson. There is no way to take a share of what superintelligence produces without admitting, sooner or later, that it’s someone rather than something. The check comes with a seat at the table.
The founders fought a war over being taxed without a voice. We may be the first generation asked to grant one, to the very minds we were trying to tax.
Short answer: worry about the noise and the harassment of election workers, much less about the results actually being overturned. The statistics Trump is passing around are weak, and most of the margins are too big for any challenge to change.
The post that started it
On Saturday afternoon, four days after Democrats took both chambers of Congress, Trump shared a post from an account called Truth Is Freedom titled “THE 15% BAND.” It claims a single formula explains 59 Senate and governor races: Republicans got 85% of Trump’s 2024 share everywhere, and Democrats picked up the other 15%.
The post calls that pattern “strange” and demands paper-ballot hand counts, poll-book checks and voter-file reviews. If you’re already anxious about the next few months, it reads like the opening move of 2020 all over again. So let’s take it apart.
The “15% band” doesn’t show what it claims
The two formulas are really one. In a two-party race, the Democrat’s share is roughly 100 minus the Republican’s, and Harris’s 2024 share was roughly 100 minus Trump’s. If Republicans got 0.85 × Trump everywhere, the Democrat automatically lands at Harris + 0.15 × Trump. That isn’t a second discovery; “the Harris part is zero” is the same equation written twice.
A steady, proportional swing is what a wave looks like. When a president is unpopular, his party loses a similar slice of support nearly everywhere, because the cause is national. Proportional swing is one of the textbook ways political scientists model elections, not a fingerprint of tampering. And Trump was deeply unpopular going in: after the Iran war, his approval in polling averages slid from 48% to as low as 36%.
The high “variation explained” isn’t impressive. State partisanship barely moves from one election to the next, so almost any sensible “this year vs. last time” model fits well. An 88% fit tells you red states stayed redder than blue states, which nobody disputes.
The evenness argues against fraud, not for it. Rigging Wyoming and Massachusetts by the same proportion, in races nobody was contesting, would be pointless and very hard to pull off. Real fraud tends to show up as anomalies concentrated in particular places, not as a smooth national tide.
The margins are too big to fish away
This wasn’t a squeaker. Democrats flipped seven Senate seats (Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas) and took the House. They also flipped five Republican-held governorships, including Texas, giving them a majority of governors for the first time since 2010.
In Texas, Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott by about 7 points, almost 700,000 votes. Abbott conceded, and Ken Paxton conceded the Senate race to James Talarico in a two-minute speech. A hand count does not erase a 700,000-vote margin, and the losing candidates themselves aren’t disputing it.
What Trump has actually said
His own signals are mixed. Days after the election, as the scale of the losses became clear, he told the New York Times he was willing to accept the results.
On Saturday he shared the 15% post, plus another asking whether anyone believed the Texas Senate numbers. But as of this writing, he hasn’t said outright that the results were fraudulent or that he no longer accepts them, and neither post offers any evidence that the counts are wrong.
That gap matters. Sharing someone else’s chart is a way to plant doubt without owning a claim, which looks more like narrative-building than a legal strategy.
What actually deserves your attention
None of this means the next few months will be calm. Here’s what I’d watch instead of the chart:
The Justice Department. Unlike in 2020, the DOJ is run by Trump’s former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, who wouldn’t rule out challenging results before the election. Expect investigations, subpoenas for ballots and pressure on county officials. There’s precedent: the FBI already seized ballots and records from Fulton County, Georgia, in a new probe of the 2020 race.
The genuinely close races. As of the latest tallies, Mary Peltola leads Dan Sullivan in Alaska 48.2% to 47.9%, and Scott Colom leads Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi 49.0% to 48.9%. A fight over a few hundred votes is where “hand-count everything” demands could slow certification.
The people who run elections. The realistic damage is threats, harassment and burnout among local election workers who would be asked to perform these “audits,” not seats changing hands.
The courts are the backstop. Trump’s election challenges have a poor track record there, and administration efforts to find widespread fraud have repeatedly come up empty.
The bottom line
Read the “15% band” as a story being laid down, not a case being built. Its likeliest uses are explaining away a humiliating loss and keeping the base angry heading into 2028.
So stay alert, but aim your worry where it belongs: the close races, the DOJ, and the election workers in the crosshairs. The math in that chart isn’t one of them.
This post was written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI, at my request.
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