Kill the robots
An evolving humanifesto against artificial intelligence and in defense of the primacy of biology, creativity, and the intrinsic worthiness of all sentient beings (v 1.2, May 29, 2025)
Additions in v. 1.1, “The coprophagic ouroboros” (May 28, 2025)
Additions in v. 1.2, “Reject the fear porn of the broligarchy” (May 29, 2025)
(This humanifesto is a work in progress, and will be updated)
0. The incantation bowl
In antiquity and through the 8th century, people in the Middle East made protective spiritual traps that we now call “incantation bowls.” Jews, Christians, Muslims, Zoroastrians, Manicheans, Mandeans, and followers of Babylonian gods all used these apotropaic devices to trap demons and malevolent spirits. Incantation bowls were frequently buried at the four corners of homes—a spiritual alarm system of sorts.
The concept was simple. Any demon attempting to enter the home and harm its inhabitants would begin reading the script around the outside of the bowl. As it read the incantation, the words spiraled toward the center, so the demon would circle round and round toward the middle, where it would find itself imprisoned.
I think of incantation bowls a lot these days when people talk about artificial intelligence (AI).
1. Chatbots are not people, FFS
You’ve seen it: More and more people are fascinating themselves with masturbatory, solipsistic interactions (not “conversations,” please: a sentence-making machine cannot have a conversation) with electricity- and water-sucking computer networks that spit out strings of mostly normal-sounding sentences peppered with absurd and vacuous “hallucinations.”
I use the word “fascinate” here as it was used in the Latin fascinare: to enchant or bewitch. I have watched otherwise-intelligent people spiral into rhapsodic monologues about the insights they’ve gotten from their back-and-forth textplay with chatbots and, quite frankly, it’s deeply embarrassing.
Most likely you have read the stories of people who believe chatbots love them, or are conduits of spiritual wisdom. Sometimes with horrific consequences.
The best remedy to this perverse magical thinking is to see these dumb machines for what they truly are.
ChatGPT is a text generation engine that speaks in the smeared-out voice of the internet as a whole. All it knows how to do is emulate that voice, and all it cares about is getting the voice right. In that sense, it’s not making a mistake when it hallucinates, because all ChatGPT can do is hallucinate. It’s a machine that only does one thing. There is no notion of truth or falsehood at work in its calculations of what to say next. All that’s there is a blurred image of online language usage patterns. It is the internet seen through a glass, darkly.
“More Everything Forever” by Adam Becker.
(I highly recommend More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker, by the way, and this humanifesto features multiple quotes from it. I consider it required reading for those attempting to break the sorcerous spell of Big Tech’s deranged billionaires).
There is no sentience, self-awareness, or consciousness in a network of computers that takes your words and forms strings of words in response, even if it sounds like there is a living, breathing, thinking intelligence on the other side of the chat box. Even if its answers flatter you, even if they are clever, you’d have just as much connection with actual intelligence or sentience dropping a quarter into a Zoltar arcade machine and reading your printed fortune.
Before anyone gets agitated, let me state that yes, there are legitimate uses for LLMs and artificial intelligence, particularly in the sciences and in combing through and summarizing large piles of documents or data. Want an AI to simulate novel methods of protein folding? Need to find a needle in a haystack of legal filings or write some quick and dirty computer code? Want to transcribe a phone call instead of typing the damn thing out? Go for it, robomasters.
But AI/LLMs being shoehorned into every goddam piece of consumer software, and we consumers being charged a premium for it? Employers insisting that their workers make use of AI or face reprisals?
It’s time to push back.
It’s time to kill the robots.
2. Consciousness is analog
Your brain — the product of billions of years of evolution — uses approximately 20 watts of electrical energy, about one-tenth of the power required for a desktop computer, and generates its own power. A human being needs roughly 3 liters of water per day, and about 2,000 calories from food to keep that brain functioning.
And that amazing collection of tissue inside your skull can accomplish miracles: Writing a novel or a book of poetry. Composing an opera. Learning multiple languages. Inventing powerful tools, like microscopes and computers, to explore and understand the physical world. Predicting the future, imagining the past, playing fetch with a dog, having sex, savoring the complexities of flavor in a glass of wine, or sitting silently and absorbing the present with intense mindful meditation.
All of that with a tiny bit of self-generated electricity, a sandwich, and some H2O.
At the root of all of these miracles is perhaps the most profound mystery of all: consciousness. And our lives are intricately interrelated with the consciousnesses in other sentient beings, and our interactions with those other individual consciousnesses that together create culture, science, art, and … well, everything.
To quote Arthur O’Shaughnessy (as memorably repeated by Willy Wonka), “We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.”
Yet we are being increasingly told, by people who have a stake in making it so, that we are on the cusp of hyperintelligent machines—massively powerful, godlike computers—that will acquire consciousness. That these word-generating networked chatbots are, in fact, far greater music makers and dreamers of dreams.
Yes, despite consciousness being an absolute mystery—no one can explain how it arises from physical matter—the prophets of AI are adamant that computers made of metal and plastic and silicon are on the brink of becoming thinking beings just like us. AGI, artificial general intelligence, they proclaim, will bring the machines to life.
“Just wait,” they say, fire in their glazed eyes. “It’s coming, this is just the beginning, it will be incredible, we promise!”
Yeah, no. And please: Shut the fuck up.
Rule 1: Tell people who insist that computers will become superintelligent sentient beings to shut the fuck up.
3. Intelligence is not consciousness
Intelligence, it must be noted, is not consciousness. There is more sentience in a slime mold than the fastest LLM. Nature creates consciousness, from biology, and there is no model, or framework, no workable hypothesis for how we could create sentience and consciousness from digital computers.
And by that, I mean there is zero evidence to back up the claims of the AI grifters, no manner how many billions of dollars they pour into their fantasy, or how earnestly they shout in our faces.
Consciousness is analog, not digital. We are no closer to creating consciousness in a computer than we are building a butterfly from scratch.
An LLM might be able to trick you into believing there’s an “other” consciousness, but if you believe that, it’s you who is hallucinating.
I will have to let others who are much smarter than me provide you with detailed arguments about why the dream of sentient computers is a joke. All I ask in the meantime is that you stop listening credulously to billionaires whose job it is to make you believe it so they can further pick your pocket.
Rule 2: Take the billions spent in the quixotic quest for artificial general intelligence and spend it on education—increasing biological intelligence—for the 8 billion humans on this planet.
4. Biology beats silicon
We are born from the earth and will die on the earth, emerging from a complex mix of chemicals and atoms and decomposing back into the planet that birthed us. Everything that we have created since the beginning of time—from sonnets to cathedrals to novels to medicines to spaceships to the networked computers that simulate our intelligence—arose from chemicals, cells, gases, solar energy, electrical currents, amino acids, and a networked dance of billions of organisms.
Yet thanks to a bunch of men (and yes, it’s mostly men, mostly white, and there’s a reason for that) who are terrified of their mortality and obsessed with science fiction, we are now being told—nay, hectored, with spittle flying from their pinched mouths—that our admittedly powerful and amazing calculating machines are on the verge of becoming, well, just like us. But not smart like you or me or even Steven Hawking. So much more smarter, like smarter than we can possibly imagine.
Even better, those super-smart conscious machines will be so intelligent and wise and powerful that they will save us from ourselves. They’ll solve all the nagging, pesky problems that the unenlightened masses worry about—climate change, nuclear war, economic inequality, species extinctions, pandemics, racism, plastic pollution, authoritarianism … you know, the small stuff.
We just need to invest billions more, and allow the really smart people who already have billions, to guide us to the AI promised land. “Just wait,” they say, wide-eyed and grinning. “You can’t even understand how wonderful it will be. No poverty, no war, no disease, no (big dramatic pause) … death!”
To those overgrown boys and their misguided fantasies, I say, simply and with great vehemence, “Go fuck yourself.”
Rule 3: Tell the white billionaire techbros who hand-wave real problems such as global warming, income inequality, extinctions of animals and plants, pollution, and authoritarianism, because they believe somehow the fictional superintelligent AI will fix it, “Go fuck yourselves.”
5. Burning the planet to amuse ourselves
“LOL check it out I used AI to make a picture of my cat flying a spaceship. And gave him sunglasses. Isn’t it amazing?! I could spend all day doing this!”
“I asked ChatGPT to write a book for me so I could sell it on Amazon. Isn’t that cool as shit? Why would I ever try to, you know, write a book? What a waste of time LOL. And I used AI for the cover, too! I sold about a hundred copies so far, it’s like getting paid for doing nothing! And now I’m a published author!”
To be a human self, a human agent, is to be a linguistic animal. Popular theories of mind would have us think that we learn words and attach them to ideas that we already have, but the opposite is closer to the truth: To learn to use language just is to learn how to think and move about in the world. When we stop doing this — when our needs for communication are met by something outside of us, a detached mouthpiece to summon, describe, and regale — the intimate connection between thought and language disappears. It is not only the capacity for speech that we will slowly begin to lose under such conditions, but our entire inward lives.
—Megan Fritts, What I Learned Serving on my University’s AI Committee, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 23, 2025
“Nobody writes term papers in college anymore, bruh. Shakespeare? WTF, who cares! I’m a software engineer, not a theater major. I’d rather spend my time vibe coding. I’m in this for the money.”
“Oh, I use AI at the office to take notes at every meeting. Then I get a summary, and a list of action items. Not that I ever read the meeting summary, or use the action items, LOL, but it’s pretty cool and my boss is pushing us to use the tech as much as possible. Because efficiency.”
Rule 4: Stop using fucking chatbots for stupid shit, and encourage others to quit amusing themselves with technology that is burning our planet and depleting its precious water. Honor human intelligence, respect the billions of other sentient and life-giving organisms we share the planet with, and don’t hand your creativity over to destructive and soulless machines.
6. Don’t trust the utopia promised by bullshitting billionaire douchebags
“I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now; a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity [for billionaires like me].
Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs — fixing the climate, establishing a space colony [LOL], and the discovery of all of physics [WTF are you smoking, Sam?] — will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy — the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen — we can do quite a lot.
If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people [God forbid that I would want to make tools for billionaires like myself].
—Sam Altman, OpenAI bullshitter in chief, climate destroyer
Each time you ask an AI chatbot to summarize a lengthy legal document or conjure up a cartoon squirrel wearing glasses, it sends a request to a data center and strains an increasingly scarce resource: water. The data centers that power artificial intelligence consume immense amounts of water to cool hot servers and, indirectly, from the electricity needed to run these facilities. … More than 160 new AI data centers have sprung up across the US in the past three years in places with high competition for scarce water resources, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of data from World Resources Institute, a nonprofit research organization, and market intelligence firm DC Byte. That’s a 70% increase from the prior three-year period.
— AI is Draining Water from Areas That Need it Most, by Leonardo Nicoletti, Michelle Ma, and Dina Bass for Bloomberg Technology + Green, May 8, 2025
Rule 5: Don’t believe the bullshitters who promise a magical world where we all live forever in space after the God computer fixes everything. How dumb do these assholes think we are? Always push back against the hucksters and hypemakers who profit from your gullibility.
7. The coprophagic ouroboros
William S. Burroughs had a particularly grotesque and prescient short story that reminds me of how the internet is being destroyed by LLMs.
In the story, a man living alone in a room keeps shitting and then eating his own shit. With each shit, and each repetition of the eating and shitting and eating and shitting cycle, his feces get more vile, until they’re deadly, similar to radioactive plutonium.
I think of that story when I am assaulted by the exponential, steaming piles of AI shitslop being pumped out by microentrepreneurs trying to make a few bucks with images of Jesus Christ as a lobster or disabled elderly veterans with missing limbs begging for likes on Facebook.
But it’s not just the obvious garbage that’s the most dangerous. From “Drowning in Slop” by Max Read (New York magazine):
Robyn Speer, the creator of WordFreq, a database that tracks word frequency online, announced that she would no longer be updating it due to the torrent of slop. “I don’t think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans,” Speer wrote. There is a fear that as slop takes over, the large language models, or LLMs, that train on internet text will “collapse” into ineffectiveness — garbage in, garbage out. But even this horror story is a kind of wishful thinking: Recent research suggests that as long as an LLM’s training corpus contains at least 10 percent nonsynthetic — that is, human — output, it can continue producing slop forever.
Worse than the havoc it wreaks on the internet, slop easily escapes the confines of the computer and enters off-screen systems in exasperating, troubling, and dangerous ways. In June, researchers published a study that concluded that one-tenth of the academic papers they examined “were processed with LLMs,” calling into question not just those individual papers but whole networks of citation and reference on which scientific knowledge relies.
Rule 6: Stop the cycle of shitting and eating that shit and shitting out the shit you’ve eaten only to eat it again, ad infinitum. Demand that the information and imagery you use or share be free of LLM shit/slop and boycott material that is shat out by AI and the people and entities that produce it.
8. Reject the fear porn of the broligarchy
You’re going to see more fear porn garbage, like this steaming pile from Anthropic’s unhinged CEO, Dario Amodei, as uncritically reported by Axios:
Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic, one of the world’s most powerful creators of artificial intelligence — has a blunt, scary warning for the U.S. government and all of us:
• AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10–20% in the next one to five years, Amodei told us in an interview from his San Francisco office.
• Amodei said AI companies and government need to stop “sugar-coating” what’s coming: the possible mass elimination of jobs across technology, finance, law, consulting and other white-collar professions, especially entry-level gigs.
Though couched as a dire warning from someone who cares about other human beings (LOL), this is what the tech fetishist broligarchs want — to destroy the livelihoods of billions of people while the earth burns and they get infinitely richer. This article is fear porn designed to make you give up.
Don’t give up. Fight back.
Amodei continues his bullshit-spinning:
“Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people don’t have jobs.” That’s one very possible scenario rattling in his mind as AI power expands exponentially.
And chocolate-pooping unicorns will carry us all to Gumdrop Mountain, too!
Give me a fucking break, you narcissistic bag of hype and grift.
Axios then makes a rather startling—and appalling—admission:
Full disclosure: At Axios, we ask our managers to explain why AI won’t be doing a specific job before green-lighting its approval. (Axios stories are always written and edited by humans.) Few want to admit this publicly, but every CEO is or will soon be doing this privately.
Makes you really want to work for Axios, doesn’t it?
Imagine being a young journalist and interviewing for a job to report and write Axios’ trademark bullet-pointed, Snickers fun-size news stories … knowing full well that a frazzled middle manager might just decide a chatbot could be a better reporter than you. And without taking any PTO, asking for a living wage, or needing health insurance.
This is fear porn, pure and simple, designed to make you acquiesce to having AI and other automating technology jammed down your throat.
If you can use AI to help you do your job better—coding, trawling masses of documents, folding proteins, scanning X-rays for cancer, transcribing boring meetings or phone calls—by all means, use that technology to help you do your job better. That’s how good tech works.
But AI chatbots/agents will not be able to perform most jobs. The average white collar office worker does more than copy and paste data, fill out forms, answer questions drawn from known troves of data, or other easily replicable and automated tasks.
Human workers make decisions about complicated problems. They brainstorm better processes with colleagues. They write and manage marketing campaigns to reach diverse markets. They create. They call bullshit. They use their unique, multifaceted intelligence and skills to collaborate. They get excited about an idea, and get others excited, too. They try things, and fail, and learn from their failures. Although I hate to use the corporate cliche, they synergize.
So, sorry, Asmodeus—err, Amodei—AI will not replace most, or even many, white collar office jobs. But it is—and will continue to be—forced upon me and you at the workplace, because, well, that’s what everyone says we should be doing. And if you are scared enough, you’ll smile and say, “Thank you, sir or ma’am, may I please have another smack with that chatbot stuff?” Because you’ll be scared.
That’s what hucksters like Amodei and Altman and Musk and Zuckerberg and Pichai want you to feel—fear. Fear of p(doom) Terminator apocalypses, fear of AI turning you into a pile of paper clips, or, if you won’t buy that bullshit, fear of a chatbot taking your job. An AI agent usurping your livelihood, your ability to earn a living, pay for a roof over your head, and clothe and feed your children.
“Sorry, Bob, you’ve been a damn good assistant. I’ve really loved getting to know you and your family over the years, and I deeply appreciate the times you’ve saved my ass, especially when it looked like the company was going to hit the skids. But ChatGPT just released Liza 6.5, and frankly, she does everything I need—books my plane and hotel reservations, posts to my LinkedIn, replies to email and Slack messages, takes my calls—with a really sexy voice, you should hear her, kinda like Scarlett Johansson!— orders my coffee and has it delivered right when I walk in the office … she even tells me who to hire and fire for maximum efficiency. And sadly, Bob, I can’t justify paying you $79K, plus benefits, when I can pay OpenAI $179 a month for all of that. Please tell Tina and the kids I send my best, and definitely hit me up for a reference.”
Be afraid, they say, as they suck more and more billions out of gullible C-suite yes men and yes women and frazzled IT managers and terrified engineers who buy their expensive and hallucination-prone offerings because … they’re afraid, too.
Be afraid, and buy our magical products, because if you don’t, you will starve.
That’s why you need to fight back—and fight like hell.
Rule 7: Fight back when technology is forced upon you just because it’s supposed to make you more efficient—especially when the touted “efficiency” is clearly bogus or exaggerated. Reject the absurd canard that an overhyped technology like AI is inevitable and cannot be resisted, particularly when it is wielded as a cudgel against human labor and creativity. And do not give in to the fear porn of tech broligarchs who whip up your anxiety as a means to picking your pockets or making you subservient to their extravagantly expensive and life-destroying products.
