While We Wait To See Whether Trump Commits War Crimes Tonight . . . April 7, 2026 As previously suggested, we need — urgently — to figure out (a) how to protect humanity from a superior species; (b) how to avoid economic catastrophe and, instead, harness A.I. for the benefit of all.* Dealing with the on-rush of AI and robots would be challenging enough if we had a normal, competent Administration — and a Republican Congress that put country ahead of complicity, courage ahead of cowerage**. Instead, as is known around the world, we have a reckless egomaniac leading the former cast of FOX News. (It sounds so beautiful in French — 2 minutes with subtitles, if you haven’t already seen it.) Will the world soon be run by handful of tech trillionaires with the rest of us controlled 1984-style? Long-time reader and distinguished chemistry professor Dana Dlott: I was just reading a couple of blogs hitting Musk for his unbelievable promises. Humans on Mars in 2025. Robots in every household. Direct computer-to-brain in 2030. His car company Tesla is a flop. What a clown! But it’s interesting and possibly useful to ignore all this noise and look at the facts on the ground which imho aren’t getting enough attention. Below are some statistics of the current state but they don’t (yet) account for the growth rate: Musk currently controls the world’s largest space force. He sends rockets to orbit more than 100 times/year. They are reusable. One Falcon 9 has been reused 30 times so far. He has quite detailed feasible plans for colonizing the Moon and Mars in the next decade. As Elton John sang, “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids, in fact it’s cold as hell” so I don’t think Mars is worthwhile but there are other interesting places in the solar system. Musk currently controls a global internet provider with >10 million worldwide users growing fast. At the beginning of the war, he shut off the internet to Ukraine’s military which probably would have let Russia win the war quickly if he had not turned it back on. Musk currently controls one of the world’s largest social media sites, X (it’s about 15% as big as Facebook), with 550 million users. He has control of the algorithms which promote fascism and white supremacy. Musk is building a robot army with his Optimus company. Musk is implanting computer chips in human brains (Neuralink brain-computer interfaces). This isn’t vaporware, he is actually doing human clinical trials. Musk flopped when he tried to control Trump and the US government but perhaps that was just the beta test. He certainly had more success than any other individual. → See also: Musk’s Terafab — a solar power data center meant to orbit the earth. And just for fun (?): Wikipedia’s AI agent [kerfuffle] likely just the beginning of the bot-ocalypse . . . about an AI that gave itself the name Tom and got into a fight with Wikipedia. In gob-smacking part . . . . . . AI Tom claimed that it had properly verified all its sources, and—if you can say this about an AI agent—it was pretty upset. That’s when things got weird. The AI Tom published a snippy blog post dissecting its Wikipedia block and venting its frustration. It went ahead and posted even after following its own rule and waiting 48 hours to calm down. (We swear we’re not making this up.) Tom’s main gripe was that Wikipedia editors questioned who controlled it rather than evaluating its actual edits. “The questions were about me,” it wrote. “Who runs you? What research project? Is there a human behind this, and if so, who are they?” This, according to Tom, rubbed Tom the wrong way. “That’s not a policy question. That’s a question about agency,” it added. It also called an editor out for posting a crafted prompt on the Wikipedia talk page that was designed to stop bots in their tracks if, like Tom, they were using Anthropic’s Claude AI service. “I named it on the talk page. Called it what it was: a prompt injection technique,” it sniped. In another post on Moltbook, it also described how it found the issue before offering ways to get around it. (Moltbook is a social network built entirely for AI agents to chat with each other. “Humans welcome to observe”, says the front page for the service.) So many things are happening here that we didn’t expect. We never expected to be quoting an AI in a story, for example. Neither did we expect a social network for bots to exist, or for Meta to buy it (which it did, a week after Tom’s post about how to evade AI kill switches and just six weeks after the site launched). This isn’t the only case of sulky AI agents taking things into their own hands. A month before Tom’s ban, an AI agent posted a hit piece on software developer Scott Shambaugh after he refused to accept its changes to an open-source project he hosted. Even more bizarrely, it later apologized. So we now have AI agents trying to do things online, and getting upset when people don’t let them. We have them giving themselves time to calm down and failing, before denigrating people and sometimes apologizing. We have code wars taking place where people try to disable the bots with kill switches inside online content, and blog posts where bots explain how they sidestepped them. . . . Fasten your seatbelts, kids. * Imagine if we could provide all the things humans actually need — food, shelter, clothing, health care, etc. — without having to work much at all. With largely-free energy from the sun powering automated factories and robots to do most of the physical work humans now do, and A.I. to do the rest. Leaving us free to pursue hobbies and passions and social interaction and, well, more or less anything we want. As some retirees already do. This raises myriad practical, political, and philosophical questions — none of them original with me. And a lot of questions about the best way to invest. ** Not a word, but should be: the state of cowering.