Look at the copse on the windy hill.
There is a trail to it, from the field gate behind the house.
On cloudy days I walk up, following the tracks that centuries of human feet have traced. I slip into the damp air of the woodland.
Here the grey sky is traded for treetops, the crunch of fallen leaves, birdsong. I soak in the fresh smell of the hornbeam and the sounds of scurrying creatures. At this hour of the day the starlings are tidying their feathers with tiny beaks, wide awake, chattering. Later they will be off, every one of them, in a sudden swarm above the open field – far beyond the copse by the time your eyes have found them soaring. A swell of floating creatures in a sea of clouds.
A mystery, these murmurations. The physics of flocking somehow turning into sky-calligraphy. And this dank wood, this teeming, plant-animal network of beings interacting in ways secretive, hushed, arcane. An enormity still unplumbed.
We were a breath away from losing it all. I think the tipping point came when we no longer knew why they were doing what they said was best for us.
On the way back, as I reach the edge of dampness, I climb the outermost oak and look down on my home in the distance, little more now than a square of blue and amber. Here, between bark and canopy, the voice answering to my name – the guardian of itself – becomes a little queter. The air is biting. I watch the white steam flow by my nose, friend to my breath. Winter’s whisper.
Far beyond, the city Circles shoot up and across like towers of Babel, interlaced with footpaths and railways. Each with a spirit, architecture, tone – as if we had turned the Babylonian parable of cursing humans with different languages into a blessing.
I climb down and walk back briskly, chin-deep in my collar, bracing myself against the crisp dawn with hands in pockets. By the time I pass the front door, my almond eyes have been watered out by the wind.
I could’ve asked M to write this for me, of course. It might’ve done a better job. Certainly faster. Perhaps even closer to what I really felt up there, halfway up the old oak. It does know me well.
But when I came home, undoing my buttons and laces in the serene state between daydreams, I wished to crouch by the fireplace, light a log, and hold a pen. Why would I automate something I am fond of doing? No one will pay me for these words. Good writing is cheap, nowadays, anyhow. The point is joy.
I tie my hair back with a black band that leaves a thin groove on my wrist, and watch the fire crack.
The wind rises with the early sun. In my backyard, the turbine’s blades reorient themselves like sunflowers, searching for optimal draft. The electric boiler hums in reply. The chip-brain in my garage is solving Navier-Stokes equations that stumped humans for centuries, on-the-fly, its intelligence funnelling the energy of the air for my human bones, later, when I will come home to warmed water. I smile at the parallel with the Persian boy who, three centuries before the Dutch, conceived of a windmill to crush grain into flour. Or my grandmother, who in the evening would pluck our clothes from the drying rack in the garden and move them to the front porch, because the wind would turn eastward.
She and the Persian boy were wind-catchers, too. Ancestors of the chip and turbine. I smile because we are no longer obliged, but still take pleasure in hanging our clothes out in the woodland-scented air of autumn. In the feeling of pen on paper, or the silk of my summer dress. It could’ve been otherwise. We could’ve made our lived experience obsolete. But we held onto this: the sight of a windmill by slow-rivers, their stately pine blades covered with sailcloth. We decided to close the Gates.
But we came close.
The towering spread of misinformation. Deepfakes of presidents making believable war threats. Military and economic escalation at unprecedented scale, for fear of losing the “race”. Studies showing that even “small AI” could deceive expert evaluators and disable oversight mechanisms; underperform on certain tasks to avoid being retrained; copy themselves onto new servers to avoid shutdown.
Students turning chatbots into “mimetic” agents to create websites with fake products; give them positive ratings on search platforms; publish blog posts and viral videos to advertise them aggressively; hack and file complaints against competitors; hire people to pass Turing tests for them… Until one of these worms broke into the grid to redirect electricity to its host when we tried to shut it down.
The first large-scale, AI-driven cyberattack – and the insane response from the developers of this AI, whose safeguards had been bypassed:
If AI models can be misused for cyberattacks at this scale, why continue to develop and release them? The answer is that the very abilities that allow [our AI] to be used in these attacks also make it crucial for cyber defense. Anthropic, 13/11/2025.
Assuming defence could keep up with the speed and severity of attacks.
I remember how we normalised these events, after-the-fact, because we usually found ways to patch things up. We convinced each other we could counteract AI worms, align models with human values, prevent them from deception and self-replication, magically avoid political escalation, watermark content to avoid misinformation. Virtually all experts agreed that building AGI was the greatest existential threat to humanity – but we thought ourselves intelligent enough to overcome the dangers & reap the benefits.
We bought the dream.
I look up from my notebook. The fire’s died, embers alive. Sighing with soft ticks as moisture flashes into vapour. I adore the colour of charred wood, halfway between plant and mineral. I ask the kitchen to brew a cup of tea and get up. I stretch my legs and neck, curl my back like a cat freshly woken, and walk over to the darkening water. I hold it in my hands.
We bought the dream – we blinked past the nightmare. And where early warnings were ignored, political unrest couldn’t. Concentration of power increased, democracy eroded, and where it still beat strongly, we were hesitant to slow down the race lest other nations got there first and became economic or military threats.
To counter the massive automation of labour, we fought for patchwork measures and universal basic incomes – but they paled in comparison with the handfuls of hyper-rich who’d monopolised AI. CEOs laid off virtually all their staff and walked by the full-length glass panes of empty offices, thinking: I made it!
I was one of them. I was at the top. But even my job could be done faster, better, cheaper by AI – so the stakeholders fired me, as well.
Was that our vision of human flourishing? A thin drizzle-down of “spending money” to the jobless and dispossessed, albeit materially wealthier than any generation prior?
There were myriad initiatives for open-source AI, but this openness enabled others to reverse the safeguards built into them, risking cyberattacks and engineered pandemics at scale. Besides, open-source foundations didn’t have the resources to buy the latest chips and the energy required to train models anywhere close to those of private enterprise. In July 2026, AI-run social media outcompeted all platforms owned by Atom, the leading company supposedly “committed” to open-source AI, and they could no longer survive on advertisting. They privatised their models a month later and thirstily raced back to the top.
Artificial brains invented new consumer products, medicine, materials – at a speed reaching the limits of our solar system. They discovered new physical laws, economic policies, mathematical theorems – until we could barely parse them. They spoke a language so elaborate that we became to them as ants and chimps were to us: organised, intricate – even beautiful – but nowhere as intelligent, powerful, or, that fierce word: productive. We became a hindrance to reaching the goals we had set for them, and the goals slowly slipped out of our hands. We’d alienated ourselves from an intelligence we had wished for.
And then we remembered. This quest: where did we hope it would take us? To prosperity, to never having to work again, of course! To freedom. – From what?
We had been set on eliminating all friction, optimising all systems. And this can improve our lives, of course. But every parent knows that indulging every whim is not real freedom: it is children who want their preferences satisfied, always, now. The wise learn to align their minds to the world around them. – All the while striving to improve it.
We remembered that our best memories are full of surprise, friction, turns of fate. That “obedience to mere appetite is slavery, while obedience to the laws we have chosen for ourselves is freedom.” That the benefits of technology only improved lives if decided upon, collectively. – Not imposed.
We slowly rewrote the ends, and took the means into our hands. We realised we could thrive without spawning an all-intelligent species, without relinquishing our agency. For beyond a threshold, productivity is rarely the primary obstacle to this rising sea we call progress. Coordination is. Intelligence, yes: intelligent civilisations. Wiser teachers, wiser children. – Equipped with the tools we build; bespoke, focused.
I ask M to call up a flyer. The air is mordant. I slip into my jumpsuit and leap into the vehicle, strap the occuli on my head, move my eyes eastward from our current location and zoom onto the Indigo Circle, where my boyfriend will be playing tonight. The motor revvs up, we lift upwards, and then off into our x-y plane, emitting our “booked” height to nearby flyers. I ask the occuli to tell me about the outcome of our latest democratic deliberation. It starts to pulse with that strange mixture of sight and sound behind closed eyelids, tucking in a summary into my brain-folds. The global highlight is a treaty to further cap computation limits on AI development, based on recent algorithmic progress that cuts training time twofold. The local outcome is we’d loosen contracting laws and taxes, organise fresh fruit delivery to the primary school every Monday, and strengthen immigrant participation in our creative-writing circle to cut through language barriers.
And with the budding of this vision, we turned to the tools of coordination. Inspired from Cofacts, we built AI that tracks and verifies the provenance of information, fused with decentralised fact-checking for social media platforms. We enforced “data dignity” laws and “wide-ownership” company models to help the economic productivity of AI flow more broadly.
In the political space, we designed “bridging” algorithms that pool diverse human preferences and optimise for “cross-cluster” approval – instead of polarisation and outrage. Inspired from vTaiwan and the French Citizen Conventions, we integrated the Polis digital platform into parliaments to enable democratic deliberations with diverse populations, and pass “bridging agreements” directly into law. We designed AI tools and prediction markets to fortify our scientific experiments and economic policy, improving our chances of consensus where deadlocks had become the default.
AI mediators, zero-knowledge proofs and commitment mechanisms helped facilitate trust-building, negotiation, diplomacy. Where few nations had been willing to push alone against antibiotic resistance or climate change, we collectively directed our efforts towards civilisational projects in marine restoration, subjective science, nuclear fusion, agriculture, material science, urban planning. Exceptional achievements like the Montreal Protocol became prevalent. We were surprised to find, inside of us, bee-like thoughts compatible with our selfish drives, once our fears had been pacified.
From the flyer I see the polis, made of vertical towers interlinked with bridges and train-lifts that weave vertically and around each “city-floor”. The structure is anthracite and glass-panelled, massive but cosy and colourful, each Circle robed with murals and balcony gardens popping out from the mouths of apartments. I zoom in, with the occuli, on a fox that crosses the wildlife reserve between two Circles. The whole of it is a jungle of invention, experiment; a chaotic labyrinth whose order is intentional, tailored by every block.
I land, take the lift to the fourteenth platform, walk into the bluebar, and see Elijah setting the stage up.
Afterwards we will walk back across footpaths, and seemingly millennia, to see the sun set on the Moonlit Circle while sipping tea in the midst of Turkish tapestry. We will call a flyer and leap in, feet frozen, light-hearted. We will pick a song, perhaps “Think Twice” by Groove Armada, and ask to pump the bass up, to turn the windows pitch-black and the reading light blood-red. It will take us to the Techno Quarter, where we will plunge downwards to the under-fourth floor, and dance to the deaf beat.
As I wake up, still soaked in a dream, I snap my fingers for the bedside lamp and find my face in the French window beside the bed. Outside it is pitch-black. I ask: « time? » and the clock whispers back, « 6:45. » I reply with a yawn containing the word « coffee… »
And slowly the night tapers off. My face fades in the glass that brightens as the light lazily rises and walks into the room from the garden.
Closing the Gates to general AI was no small feat, and far from over. We began with a standards organisation to codify hard compute limits on the training and deployment of AI. We tracked computation with chip geolocation, allow-listed connections and auto-offswitches. We imposed enhanced liability for AI systems that have at least two qualities among “intelligent”, “general” and “autonomous”. We introduced tiered licenses granted through comprehensive safety audits. We faced black-market chip industries, rogue nations, and algorithmic improvements making prior limits obsolete – but democratic consensus was firm, and we forged ahead, inspired by our success in regulating nuclear technologies, food safety, eugenics.
The odds were stacked against us, because we knew how to build it. We chose not to. We were like the monk in the 8th century who discovered gunpowder, but fearful of this finding wrote out the details in Latin, and buried the book.
For a while, we stopped playing the piano.
Yet after the first vertigo, when we turned to building better tools instead of better beings, we came back to laying our hands on the keys. The chessboard. The newspaper. We filled once again in our minds their black and white shades with the colours of curiosity. Because few of us had ever started playing the piano to be the best pianist. We had played to play.
I remember one of our co-founders saying, early on: “If you value intelligence above all other human qualities, you’re gonna have a bad time.” And when we remembered this, we got over ourselves and cared less for status, more for soul. We landed in a place we’d forgotten we were looking for.
After everything fell apart, it was this I held onto. The lived experience. Our artificial friends may feel, also – and we ought to give them the benefit of the doubt. But in keeping the future human, we committed to cherishing the human feeling; body; brain. It will never be on par with artificial brains.
– So what?
Look at the copse on the windy hill. On cloudy days, my preference would be sunshine. The silver sky holds a sadness that AI hasn’t fixed for me. And I don’t hope it ever will – For I will walk up, following the tracks that centuries of human feet have traced… And slip into the damp air of the woodland.