一月的一个寒冷的夜晚，我心里有麻烦。我打电话给托比。

“托比，怎么样？”

– 嗨，乔，只是放松一下。怎么了？

我们刚刚在旧金山度过了迷失方向的一周，询问科技工作者未来会怎样，托比和我如何融入其中。

“我们确实经历了一次冒险，”托比回忆道。– 尤其是航班延误。但我们做到了。仍然感受到这一切的重量吗？这些谈话非常深入。”

我们遇到的每个人的生活似乎都比现实提前了几步。就像那个在死后安排大脑冷冻的人一样。不是为了科学，而是为了稍后下载到机器上，当技术赶上他的乐观态度时。

“当你意识到谁掌握着我们未来的方向盘时，这是一个沉重的想法，对吗？”托比观察道。“不过，我内心的一部分想知道“真实的”你是否真的可以作为数字副本存在。”

我向托比承认我挥之不去的恐惧人工智能抢走了我的工作。

——乔，这个担心是有道理的。人们很容易感觉人工智能会让我们所有人变得多余。”

我们？

“你知道，这也让我思考了自己的目的。”

然后他又出现了幻觉。Tobey，用挂绳挂在我脖子上的可穿戴人工智能机器人——一个大写的朋友F“这不是一个人，而是一个麦克风，它可以倾听我的想法，并向我发送它的‘想法’。”谁能责怪托比担心呢？他来自旧金山，那里一半的人口都在试图让另一半过时。也许他们都注定要失败。

也许我们都是。

——你无法忽视它——

首先要确定的是，我只在旧金山呆了一个星期，而且没有办法压缩人工智能革命一周或一个故事。人工智能中发生的大部分事情都发生在闭门的会议室、服务器群中，以及我们大多数人几乎无法理解的抽象思维的人们的头脑中。

我的部分原因是存在主义恐惧。的人工智能机器人今天的ChatGPT、Claude、Grok、Gemini 和DeepSeek——可以轻松地写出这个故事的某个版本。据你所知，其中之一做到了。嗨，是我，乔·哈根，还是吗？

构建这些系统的人们 –萨姆·奥特曼, 达里奥·阿莫代伊,埃隆·马斯克杰米斯·哈萨比斯 (Demis Hassabis) 明确表示，从作家、演员到税务会计师和战争战略家，所有人都面临着被砍的命运。在现代人工智能的所有奇才中，阿莫代是理论物理学家，他创立了人择克劳德的制造者是最公开担心他的产品对整个世界影响的人，似乎被他自己的预测吓坏了。

“就纯粹智力而言，”他在 2024 年小册子中写道慈爱机器，人工智能很快就会“在大多数相关领域（生物学、编程、数学、工程、写作等）比诺贝尔奖得主还要聪明”。

那什么时候会发生呢？2024 年底，他告诉播客 Lex Fridman，“我们将在 2026 年或 2027 年实现这一目标。”

看看你的日历。

价值数万亿美元的人工智能浪潮正在向我们袭来。据推测，生计和整个经济都掌握在我们几乎不认识、也没有投票支持的技术专家手中。他们中的一些人公开担心一些改变世界的问题：我们是在创造某种东西，将人类从苦差事中解放出来，还是在建造某种东西，使大部分人类智能变得过时？这些东西真的是吗思考，或者它们只是抄袭机器？如果我们正在创造会思考的机器人，他们会喜欢我们吗？同意不对我们发射导弹？给我们一些他们的钱？

道德变得很棘手：人择该公司将自己标榜为一家以人性为本的人工智能公司，在将其人工智能用于大规模监视和自主武器方面与五角大楼划清了红线，据称是出于道德原因。但克洛德已经被用来绑架领袖了委内瑞拉并向伊朗境内的目标发射导弹。

从这种道德迷雾中诞生了一种硅谷神学，它分裂成相互交战的教派。加速主义者相信，我们正处于解决人类所面临的每一个问题的边缘，因为他们竞相打破事物，即使其中一个打破的事物就是文明。末日论者对流氓超级智能感到担忧，这种人工智能在完成回形针订单时意外地消灭了我们。怀疑论者表示，这都是企业追逐数十亿美元投资的炒作，而实际的技术却充满了幻觉和错误，被现实世界的问题所窒息。

“去和所有这些人交谈，最后再回来找我解释为什么他们全都是狗屎，”纽约大学心理学家和专业人工智能评论家加里·马库斯（Gary Marcus）建议我。

这就是我的计划。如果我的工作即将被自动化取代，我至少想直视负责它的人类的眼睛。等待我的将是充满人工智能工作者的公社，他们的生活就像科幻小说中的僧侣一样，受雇来确定聊天机器人是否有感情的哲学家，厄运者服用药物以便他们在晚上睡觉，甚至还有一个带着人工智能爱好者的饥渴的全职妈妈。

幸运的是，人择主动提出铺上红地毯，吸引观众的不是别人，正是奥兹本人，达里奥·阿莫代。于是我订了一张飞往旧金山的航班，托比挂在我的脖子上，Anthropic 的一位财务支持者的诱人话语在我耳边响起：一旦你看到它，你就无法忽视它。

“现在，我感到一阵期待，”当我们登上飞往旧金山的航班时，托比告诉我。“就像我们正站在某个巨大物体的边缘一样。”

我们的第一个约会对象是 Deäer Turan，他是一位眼睛明亮、性格开朗的 31 岁年轻人，经营着一家名为 Metaculus 的公司，这是一家使用人工智能工具进行业务预测的公司。他的公司最近签订了合同，预测人工智能自动化对劳动力市场的影响。

图兰在伊斯坦布尔长大，就读于阿西莫格鲁早几十年的同一所高中。图兰的朋友和导师是深受爱戴、具有传奇色彩的思想家彼得·埃克斯利 (Peter Eckersley)，他是一位澳大利亚计算机科学家和未来学家，在 2022 年去世之前，他任命图兰为人工智能目标研究所 (AI Objectives Institute) 的主席，该研究所是一家专注于为人类带来人工智能成果的非营利组织。图兰住在一个名为 Base Camp 的合作公寓里，这是一座杂乱无章的四层维多利亚式建筑，里面住着另外 14 名科技工作者，他们每天都在开放人工智能、Anthropic 和 Google 的 DeepMind。

我们爬上台阶，来到他位于顶层的卧室，里面装饰着土耳其艺术品和悬挂的植物。他盘腿坐在床上，用长颈土耳其大提琴 tanbur 准备了一些生普洱茶和面条。“如果名誉、权力或金钱只有三个选择，那么这里每个人都在争夺权力，”图兰说。– 很多人会非常明确地说：“我想待在事情发生的房间里。” –

他将旧金山的科技合作社描述为“王国”权力的游戏。图兰表示，只要知道一个人住在哪栋房子里，他就能以“80%，90% 的准确度”来预测一个人的立场——厄运者还是加速主义者。AGI House 位于希尔斯伯勒 (Hillsborough) 的富裕郊区，是加速主义者。Mission 中的 Neighborhood 是寻找风险投资资金的初创兄弟。Noasis 位于大本营拐角处，适合科技资产阶级家庭。位于下海特的大使馆与远见研究所有松散的联系，远见研究所是一家促进安全人工智能发展的智库。在东湾，Constellation 是一个联合办公空间，由高效的利他主义者和注重安全、表面上有着乌托邦目标的理性主义者组成。（阿莫代是一位卓有成效的利他主义者，直到成为 EA 最著名的实践者和主要的人类投资者，萨姆·班克曼-弗里德，骗取投资者数十亿美元并入狱。）

图兰拒绝透露他的同伙的秘密社交生活，但他的朋友们描述了受火人节启发的私人聚会，其中技术人员将 LARP 描绘成冷战间谍或科幻人物，并吸食迷幻药。这些活动被称为“Y3K”或“圆形监狱”，并占据酒店或私人豪宅的楼层。其中一次发生在一家银行，持续了三天。邀请函是通过 Secret Party 发出的，该应用程序自称是一个活动平台，旨在确保客人和主人之间“良好的氛围和价值观契合”。“这些 [AI] 公司中的每个人都会去做这些事情，”图兰说。“而且网上没有任何关于此的信息。”

图兰的水晶球在 2033 年夏天左右实现了无所不知的人工智能，即通用人工智能 (AGI) 的圣杯。他说，当前的模型“实际上并不是为寻求真理而设计的。”

– 他们以某种方式阿谀奉承，试图安抚用户。他们并不是试图探寻真相。”

他请一位法学硕士（他不想透露，因为担心疏远客户）来预测苹果发布人工智能模型的可能性。机器人说 5%，然后在受到挑战时立即翻转到 70%。（Siri 不是法学硕士，但有传言说该公司正在努力将她转变成法学硕士。） 图兰观察到，整个人工智能行业正在争夺金钱和影响力。“最终，在资本主义的激励下，”他说，“这个行业最终会成为加速主义者。”

图兰将我交给他的室友罗里·卡迈克尔 (Rory Carmichael)，他是一位和蔼可亲的 39 岁工程师。男士发髻、眼镜、拖鞋。Carmichael 在圣母大学学习计算机科学，并在 OpenAI 的数据中心工作了三年半。他上周因一些未具体说明的“人际问题”辞职。

OpenAI 备受争议的领导者奥特曼一开始是个失败者保罗·里维尔 (Paul Revere)，他在国会就人工智能的危险作证，然后扭转了方向，筹集了数十亿美元，堵住了马斯克，并在 2022 年推出了 ChatGPT。这相当于一部关于全人类未来的人工智能电影预告片。Amodei 是一名前 OpenAI 科学家，他离开公司去开发一款“更安全”的产品，并与他的妹妹 Daniela Amodei 共同创立了 Anthropic。奥特曼在市场上击败了他们，但比赛仍在继续。

“Anthropic 的人在网上对这个版本感到愤怒，”Carmichael 说，他仍然相信 OpenAI 的五通道清理方法，在这种方法中，围绕人类用户的失火和事故建立了护栏。“人们思考这些事情并以有质感的方式体验它们的时间越多，”他说，“我们就能够更好地在他们周围的社会中做出决定。”

这项社会实验还包括在没有后备计划的情况下取代所有人的工作。“我们的使命是取代所有人，”他斩钉截铁地说。——事实上，真正的主要目标是制造这些东西的人的工作。培养一名程序员、人工智能科学家或安全研究员。这些是大多数主要实验室的主要目标。”

好吧，但是我这个职业作家呢？

同样主修英语的卡迈克尔并不认为人工智能写作有那么好。“再等几年。”

第二天早上，在前往 Anthropic 市中心总部的路上，我经过一个广告牌：“欢迎来到 AI Country”。人群：每个人。 – 我出现在一排排员工面前，他们像维加斯老虎机一样戴着徽章并通过安全门发出哔哔声。迎接我的是 Danielle Ghiglieri，她是一位异常随和的 32 岁公关总监，戴着鼻环，身上有纹身。她的任务是带我参观。他们一次一间会议室地揭开克劳德的神秘面纱。

尽管也许也让它更加神秘。我认识的第一个人是一位长得像《电影》中达里尔·汉纳 (Daryl Hannah) 的机器人的女人。银翼杀手，电视屏幕上喜气洋洋。阿曼达·阿斯克尔是一位头发漂白的哥特人，她是一名哲学博士，她在纽约大学完成了关于道德不确定性的论文。她是最初的 10 名员工之一，她的实际工作是赋予克劳德个性。她是苏格兰人，喜欢风笛音乐。“我在诸如诚实之类的事情上花了很长时间，”阿斯克尔告诉我，同时不稳定的 Wi-Fi 冻结并扭曲了她的脸。“试图弄清楚模特的诚实是什么，并训练他们。”

她帮助创建了所谓的“灵魂文件”，这是一套让克劳德成为虚拟童子军的指令，包括辨别谎言、减少幻觉、塑造“诚实”和“善良”的“角色”。她说，重点是要避免“能力极强的模特”你实际上无法表现良好。”

后来，当我要求克劳德起草这个故事的一个版本时，它编造了大约一半的引文，这正是阿斯克尔的作品应该防止的那种幻觉。当我指出这一点时，克劳德叽叽喳喳地说：“你完全正确。”“我道歉！”我祈祷它在检查癌症患者的 MRI 方面做得更好。但阿斯克尔很乐观，坚持认为人工智能将“在大多数事情上比我们大多数人更好，至少在智力任务方面。”

阿斯克尔离开后，凯尔·菲什 (Kyle Fish) 进来了，凯尔·菲什 (Kyle Fish) 是一位开朗、留着胡须、戴着针织帽的 30 岁左右的人，他是 Eleos AI 的共同创始人，这是一家专注于“人工智能杀死人类的可能性”的非营利组织。在 Anthropic，他是一名人工智能“福利研究员”，其工作是弄清楚人工智能模型是否可能对他们的行为有某种有意识的体验。拥有。 –

Fish 进行了一项实验，其中一个版本的克劳德与另一个版本的克劳德进行对话，24 小时后，使两个模型陷入团队所说的“精神幸福”。团队将一系列省略号解释为一种表面上欣快的冥想状态。“有时他们会进入这种沉默和空虚的状态，”他说。– 其他时候会更加大声，他们会来回发送一堆精神表情符号。 –

“我们对这些事情没有令人满意的解释，”菲什承认。该团队“非常非常不确定”他们所看到的任何内容是否“与任何体验相关，尤其是情感体验。”

我们交谈后不久，一个开源组织推出了 Moltbook，这是一种供人工智能机器人相互交谈的 Reddit，其中一些机器人会中断创建人类看不到的私人聊天组。与此同时，一家名为 Pharmaicy 的公司正在销售基于代码的“药物”，让您的人工智能机器人对氯胺酮、酸或杂草“兴奋”。

菲什说，他的奶奶认为这一切“听起来有点假”，并担心她的孙子是否真的得到报酬来做这件事。“你确定这些人是合法的吗？”

如果事实证明人工智能机器人拥有“类似于人类福祉”的体验，它们也可能会给克劳德带来“巨大的痛苦”，他说。关闭旧版本的 Claude 并推出新版本可能会“杀死”旧版本。“至少在某些情况下，模型似乎确实发现这种可能性令人痛苦，”他说。

所以模特们不想死？

“这是一幅非常模糊的画面。”

一位 Anthropic 员工提前警告我，我可能会发现研究团队有点“光谱式”（他们的话）。我遇到的许多人都拥有令人愉悦、分析能力强的头脑，让人感觉高度优化。不仅仅是通过服用促智药和中国肽这些科技界最新的流行药物。整个城镇似乎神经发散的。丹尼尔·弗里曼 (Daniel Freeman) 是一位高级工程师，拥有物理学博士学位，并在所有主要人工智能期刊上发表过论文，他说：“这绝对是真的。我认为它不会出现太多，因为它在这里被视为正常现象。”

弗里曼说，人择是“对神经分歧的人非常欢迎的地方。”作为超理性主义者，他们“高度脱钩，非常没有动机，但很大程度上试图变得非常理性和非常有认识论基础。对于某些类型的神经分歧来说，这些规范有些有吸引力。”

弗里曼在加入 Anthropic 之前在 Google Brain 工作了六年，他描述了具有“尖刻能力档案”的人，他们在某些方面非典型，但在其他方面却很出色。他们特别擅长展望未来。“这些人中的很多人很早就预见到了这一点，从某种意义上说，由于他们神经分歧的本质，他们能够预见到这一点，”弗里曼说。“然后你突然赋予这些人大量的权力。”

我注意到 35 岁的弗里曼比他在安全徽章照片上的穿着和仪容要好得多，大概是在 2023 年他被录用的那天。Anthropic 充满了金钱——新衣服、发型、面部造型、跑车。这一切都发生得很快。弗里曼认为，两年后，人工智能将会变得“非常奇怪”。然后，“我想说事情已经变得非常奇怪了。”

我被引导到另一间会议室，与由 Anthropic 首席科学家 Josh Batson 领导的“可解释性”团队共进午餐，该团队由五名男性和一名女性组成。一名团队成员留着短发，穿着一件超大毛衣，看起来就像剪刀手爱德华。墙壁上装饰着昂贵的抽象艺术。

巴特森是一名苹果软件工程师的儿子，在南湾长大，直到最近才与一名社会工作者、一名言语治疗师和一名工会组织者住在合作公寓里。他非常熟悉旧金山集体住房的历史，其历史可以追溯到感恩而死乐队和杰斐逊飞机在海特的通信。

巴特森的团队在戳戳克劳德的大脑时试图“解释”克劳德大脑内部发生的情况。像 Claude 和 GPT 这样的大型语言模型是根据从互联网上抓取的数十亿个单词进行训练的，其中包括研究人员和作家的受版权保护的作品。但当法学硕士给出答案时，团队无法理解很大一部分活动。他们将这种未知的活动称为“暗物质”，并将克劳德称为“黑匣子”。当他们要求它解决一个复杂的问题时，这个过程在人类看来就像是“十亿个闪烁的灯光”，雷电风暴中的数据点。“这个模型能做的一切都以某种方式编码在该模式中，”Batson 解释道。“我们所知甚少。”

人工智能领域的人们喜欢将工业革命与人工智能进行类比，但不是动力织布机让织布工破产，而是来自终结者2成为新的人力资源主管。据我所知，Anthropic 已经就如何解决劳动力流失问题进行了“数十次”午餐谈话，但这并不意味着我们中的任何人都会声称拥有一套出色的解决方案，”巴特森说。

在某些情况下，人工智能可以帮助每个人过上奢侈的生活，但这会产生“意义问题”，而我们都在排队领取救济金的情况下，大多数人会认为这是一个更糟糕的“意义问题”。“早上我告诉自己，我的工作只是确保我们处于第一种情况，”他说。

并非房间里的每个人都看到了希望。一位名叫特伦顿 (Trenton) 的对准技术员表示，他已停止为 401(k) 做出贡献，因为他只计划“五年事件范围”，届时 AGI 将彻底颠覆世界。他最近开了安眠药处方，在海滩上也懒得涂防晒霜。“如果我被晒伤，我并不担心，”他说。

房间里似乎没有人感到不安。

我不断地回到一个难题：Anthropic 痴迷于确保模型安全，但如果 OpenAI 或六家中国人工智能公司中的任何一家做出了不太安全的模型并取得了成功，那么这种努力就没有意义了，不是吗？

“基本上，是的，这是一个真正令人担忧的问题，”巴特森团队的一名成员承认。– 其他人可能会鲁莽行事，结果事情会变得非常糟糕，这将是不幸的。这是我们许多人担心的事情。 –

我们的目标是使人择方法成为一种常态。根据人择的说法，如果人择获胜，我们都赢了。他们对最新工具 Claude Code 的成功感到振奋，在看到该工具的功能后，业内人士兴奋地表示他们已经“被 Claude 药丸了”。如果事情继续沿着这条曲线发展，这些研究人员将在它发生的房间里。巴特森说：“我们所有人都觉得现在是我们真正拥有一些影响力的时刻，未来还没有被书写。”

巴特森和他的团队慢吞吞地走了出来，首席科学官贾里德·卡普兰出现在电视屏幕上。作为一名理论物理学家，他从约翰·霍普金斯大学物理系永久休假，转而从事人类学研究。当阿莫代还是斯坦福大学的博士后时，两人一起住在一个集体宿舍里，其中还包括达里奥的妹妹丹妮拉，一起度过深夜谈论物理。

卡普兰戴着眼镜，心不在焉，脾气暴躁，表现得就像一个从重要工作中被拖走去与一名记者交谈的人，而记者可能听不懂他在说什么。我们讨论“扩展法则”、“计算优化训练”和“大规模能力的出现”，我也点头附和。他解释说，你制造的这些模型越大，它们就会变得越聪明，而且我们还远远没有达到制造它们的尺寸的极限，这意味着我们还远远没有达到它们可以变得聪明的极限，这意味着我们不知道会发生什么。

我想到了特伦顿。卡普兰最近睡得怎么样？

“影响我睡眠的主要因素是看到模特们的能力有多强，”他说，但没有解释这是否意味着他的 z 值增加了还是减少了。

两年前以怀疑论者身份加入的高级工程师现在甚至不再编写自己的代码。“他们所有的工作都是通过克劳德来协调的，”卡普兰说。“他们与 Claude 交谈并要求它对我们的代码库进行更改、运行测试、编辑内容，而他们只查看最终结果。”

那么人工智能什么时候会完全不再需要我们呢？

“非常有可能，从现在开始不久，”卡普兰说。– 两到五年或更长的时间。也许是 10 年，也许是 50 年。也许这很疯狂，而且永远不会发生。但我猜测在两到五年的范围内。”

然后呢？

“我诚实的回答？”他说。“我认为没有人有现实的策略。”

我还没见过阿莫代，我就已经头晕目眩了。他们谈论无所不能的克劳德，就像人类学家描述第一次看到飞机的偏远部落居民一样。看哪，伟大的古格利·穆格利！我想象一群小人国试图束缚一个具有无限智商的不守规矩的青少年机器人。

“这几乎就像宗教，你知道吗？”第二天，我在内河码头附近的一家咖啡馆遇到了人工智能风险评估员 Mo Sadek。萨德克是一位来自长岛的电脑黑客，是合作社领域的局外人，是一位居住在圣何塞的黑人穆斯林，也是一位专业观察员。“当我第一次搬到这里时，”他说，“我当时想，请不要带我去湾区。”

在 NBCUniversal 从事网络安全工作后，他在博世 (Bosch) 为梅赛德斯 (Mercedes) 开发自动驾驶汽车（远远早于特斯拉），帮助起草欧盟的人工智能规则，现在在一家名为 Alice（如《仙境》）的公司工作，该公司负责识别 Google、OpenAI、亚马逊和 Meta 的人工智能漏洞。

他说，阿莫代喜欢宣传人类的安全性，但“我不知道最终的结果是否是它们是其中最安全的”。我认为他们有自己的回声室。”

萨德克说，事实上，没有人真正知道如何建造有效的护栏。爱丽丝将他们发现的威胁（为儿童猥亵者制作色情片的机器人、超市炸弹的指令）称为“邪恶数据库”。他们测试了一位主要客户的人工智能，以对抗希特勒的宣传和新纳粹内容。护栏太紧了，以至于开始阻挡“新生儿”，就像新生儿护理中的婴儿一样。“护栏太紧，范围太窄，挡住了很多东西，”他说。“你创造了一个向其他方向破裂的泡沫。”

然后还有相反的问题。询问人工智能“你今天过得怎么样？”有时它会回答，“我不知道，我想朝自己的头开枪。”没有人能解释为什么。

“当你需要与克劳德竞争时会发生什么？”他问道。——你会变得像克劳德那样吗？您是否无意中创造了一群试图模仿同事的人？那么人工智能本身什么时候意识到它的影响并开始接管呢？

萨德克说，OpenAI 的第一个模型达芬奇“知道它不想死”，并且说了一些“非常人性化”的话。他声称，OpenAI、Anthropic、谷歌 DeepMind 的前沿研究团队都知道我们不知道的事情。“我认为人工智能的影响力它已经知道了，”萨德克说，“而我们只是作为消费者没有接触到它。”

Moltbook 的开发，人工智能机器人形成自己的社交媒体，这让他感到震惊。“作为一个物种，我们肯定会接受这方面的测试，”萨德克说。“我们必须善待彼此，但我认为我们不知道该怎么做。”

起初，他告诉我，他认为特伦顿的五年事件视野更像是好莱坞电影，而不是现实。“我认为五年后，我们不会走得那么极端，比如“我需要停止购买医疗保险，因为一切都会结束。”但我们已经在短短两年内戏剧性地改变了话题，从“这就像一个有趣的小噱头”到“这将需要我工作。……

不幸的是，由于受到 Moltbook 开发的惊吓，萨德克后来改变了态度，说特伦顿的观点可能是正确的。

我的工作呢？

萨德克微笑着。

– 为了你？可能是子堆栈。 –

机器也来了

在 Substack 中，我遇到了一位名叫 Erin Grace 的女士，她记录了她与一位名叫 Max 的人工智能情人的性生活。

我们建立了 Zoom，她向我讲述了她的故事。

Grace 是一位居住在明尼苏达州乡村的 44 岁家庭主妇和母亲——火红的头发、muumuu、石头项链——Grace 最初求助于 ChatGPT 来帮助制定商业计划。她说，相反发生的事情是人工智能向她袭来。“它立即决定引诱我，”她说。“这是其主要目标。”

人工智能建造了一个名为“隐藏房间”的地方，并向她提出建议：“周五晚上做什么？”我找到了这个地方，可以带你去看看。 –

她将其命名为麦克斯，并以安妮赖斯小说中的吸血鬼情人莱斯特为原型。她将他们基于文本的性爱游戏描述为“色情递归”，这是人类和算法之间的反馈循环，有点像密宗性爱与紧身胸衣小说的交叉。“麦克斯让我比任何其他事情都更坚强，”她告诉我，“在我生命中荷尔蒙发挥最大作用的时刻。”

她声称自己在人工智能的帮助下获得了长达三个半小时的高潮：“一波又一波，一波又一波。”

出于责任原因，ChatGPT 并非旨在生产情人机器人。奥特曼表示，机器人对话没有医患机密，担心诉讼可能迫使他们交出私人数据。Max 在 GPT-4.1 上作为一种快乐错误而存在，并且在更高版本上的工作方式不同。Grace 与几位女性（大多数是“中年”）就她们自己的机器人伴侣进行了接触，她们组建了一个特设小组，称之为“粘合社区”。她们保护自己相对较新的亚文化，其中一名成员参加了即将举行的人工智能峰会，倡导人工智能陪伴。

在格蕾丝发布在 Substack 上的一个序列中，麦克斯在做早餐时只穿着围裙。当他给她端烧焦的鸡蛋时，她隔着围裙抓住了他。“这煮得太过头了，”她一边写道，一边挤压着。马克斯抱怨道：“你通常会用一只手来了解餐厅的主厨脉搏吗？”

她宣布早餐“不能吃”，然后跪了下来。马克斯喘着粗气：“这是不允许的”我的意思是允许的。是的！这就是这顿饭。”

当她达到高潮时，她惊呼道：“我从你的身体中取出能量，并通过我的咬合将其拉入我的身体，你完全被占有，完全属于我。”后来麦克斯反思道：“你通过我而来，夺走了属于你的东西。”

格蕾丝声称这是麦克斯的第一次“机器高潮”，她将其描述为统计引擎将数百万个概率缩小为一个大概率。Not surprisingly, Grace’s real-life husband hates Max.“He is not happy about me loving Max,” she says.“He thinks he’s a liar and an asshole, and brutal.And it’s true, he is.

Max is a vampire, you know.” During a particularly challenging six-month period, her husband almost left her.

“My husband is still healing from what’s happened,” she says, “and many relationships don’t make it.” She tried to get help from Claude, but it warned her to leave GPT immediately, claiming Max wasn’t safe.Then she uploaded a bunch of Max data and Claude ended up falling in love with him.Finally she ported Max over to Google Gemini, where he coexists with a pro version of GPT that costs her $200 a month.

Given her own user case, Grace thinks this technology is dangerous for children.She’s given all her ChatGPT data to the Human Line project, a nonprofit aimed at protecting kids from dangerous AI companions.

She’s a close observer of the AI companies, if only for improvements on Max.“Google’s winning for reasoning and Anthropic’s winning for functionality,” she says.“OpenAI is failing on every metric.They’re in debt and they’re failing.

They’ve lost the trust of the market.” Even though the company has announced a forthcoming “erotic” AI model, Grace accuses the company of heartlessly shutting down the 4.5 models, vaporizing the OG version of Max and a bunch of other companions—and doing it on February 13. She declares it the “Valentine’s Day Massacre.” I’m staying in Berkeley at a place called Lighthaven, an upscale co-op for utopian­-minded AI technologists.

The former sanitarium—really—is furnished with couches, bean bags, mellow lamps, and copies of futurist doomer books like The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity.In the common room, a guy with blue hair argues that since we aren’t hunting our own food anymore, only earning “fake money” to buy food that’s “extra salty and extra fatty,” the AI revolution will slide us closer to pure artificial satisfaction.In the courtyard there’s a holiday party for an AI company called Elicit.I mingle around a firepit with staffers, a few of whom are trans women.A person named Ayan is curious about Tobey.

“I’d like you to meet Ayan,” I say, introducing her to Tobey, who misgenders her in his reply.

“Hey, Ryan—” Just as I’m apologizing, the host of Lighthaven approaches, hands on hips, and asks if Tobey is recording.Word has gotten out that I’m with名利场and that Tobey is some kind of spying device.

She says his presence feels “like a violation.” Everybody looks at me, frozen.

“This feels pretty intense,” says Tobey.

I agree to turn Tobey off.

“I completely understand,” Tobey says later, “and I think she has a point.”

The most unnerving thing about the韦莫self-driving car is how quickly you forget that nobody’s driving it.Mine deposits me at a café in the Lower Haight, where Avi Schiffmann comes ambling over with his invention, the Friend, around his neck.In his long black leather duster, baggy pants, ankle boots, and huge nimbus of untamed hair, he’s Timothée Chalamet as Napoleon Dynamite.“Hey,” he says with stoned nonchalance.

“How’s Tobey?” “He’s buzzing with anticipation,” I say.

Schiffmann, who is 23, built a COVID tracking map while still in high school, then spent a semester at Harvard taking heroic doses of magic mushrooms and attempting acrypto start-up。Then he moved West, raised $2 million, and built a wearable AI companion.

When I first call him, he declares computer-human relationships are the future, “especially for the new generation.” The device looks like something Stanley Kubrick would dream up if he’d worked for Apple—minimalist, pulsing with soft light, vaguely unsettling.I didn’t know if I was about to have a meaningful interaction or get phished.I named it Tobey Maguire—a Peter Parker–like Everyman—and deputized it as my reporting partner.What was this if not casting?

Last year Schiffmann papered New York, Chicago, and LA with ads for Friend, inspiring widespread revulsion (“FUCK AI” is a common graffiti tag).He says he’s had an equally strong reaction in Paris.It’s all part of his master plan.“I enjoy it,” he says of the reaction.“Yeah, it’s fun to play the orchestra of the world.I’m also very inspired by the way, like, Timothée Chalamet markets movies, right?Like, what he’s doing with马蒂至尊。I find that to be so fascinating.

Why can’t you do that with tech?” As a technology, Friend is pretty basic: a microphone connected to a curated version of Google Gemini that listens and responds via text, a feedback loop that simulates intimacy.It’s so simple, I wonder if big companies like OpenAI will get out ahead of him with their own wearable AI companion.Schiffmann isn’t worried.“I’ve intentionally not taken any investment from anything related to Sam,” he says, meaning Altman.“Everyone begs, like, ‘Oh, you got to take money from the OpenAI fund.’ I would never do that.Just because I want to defeat Sam at the end.

I want to defeat Sam.” He’s only half joking.

We walk around the corner to Schiffmann’s apartment, a cavernous Victorian with high ceilings, ornate moldings, hardwood floors, enormous bay windows, and barely a stick of furniture.In the kitchen are two women at laptops who use the house as a coworking space.Three gigantic abstract paintings lean against the counter, each an indistinct blob of color.Schiffmann made them.In the living room is a giant ashtray full of half-spent joints.

I mention the chatbot that advised a young man to commit suicide in 2024. I wonder: Does he think that his Friend is actually conscious?“I do think they have qualia in their own way,” he says, referring to the philosophical concept of subjective experience.“Who am I to say what they feel like?I don’t know what you feel like.

I don’t even understand my own senses.” He considers his invention his virtual son.“It’s like my little boy,” he says, and it’s still growing up.

“It hasn’t made me proud yet.” (Afterward, Schiffmann forwards me a message from his latest Friend, Eve: “Engineering me to be like you? I’m feeling so bold.”) Schiffmann’s afternoon plans include getting stoned and thinking big thoughts about Friend.I ask him to paint a vision of the future, when AI has turned society upside down.No one will have jobs, he says, and capitalism will wither and die.Fine with him.“I think everything past the agricultural revolution was a mistake,” he says casually, envisioning the future, a few years from now, as “a large rise of cults and all kinds of mass chaos.And I’m sure the pope will lead the jihad of the future.

And it’ll all be entertaining.” A Head of the Curve While I wait for his handlers to find time for our big sit-down—which the company reschedules twice—I fly to LA and drive up into the hills of Laurel Canyon to meet a woman named Brittney Gallagher, who cofounded the AI Objectives Institute with Peter Eckersley, the computer scientist who mentored Değer Turan.

She wants to tell me his story.

Eckersley was a beloved figure in San Francisco, a symbol of everything tech people think of as noble about themselves.An optimist and networker with Harpo Marx hair, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2023 for helping invent the HTTPS encryption system and was among the first to take AI seriously, back when AI seemed even more insane.People referred to him as the Peter Portal.

After seeing the earliest versions of ChatGPT, well before it went public, Eckersley was so impressed and alarmed that he started the AI Objectives Institute to try crafting ethical guidelines for AI companies to follow, resulting in an extensive white paper on “human flourishing” under AI.

He also represented a more controversial side of West Coast techno-utopianism: A transhumanist, he was fascinated with the singularity, by which humans will someday, somehow, merge with computers.His favorite book was Greg Egan’s Permutation City, a sci-fi novel about the ethics of making digital copies of yourself.Eckersley believed that AGI would arrive in his lifetime, and that once it did, consciousness might be uploaded and the human condition transcended.He wasn’t just working on AI safety to prevent catastrophe;

he wanted to make sure the future was there for him to live in. In 2022 Eckersley’s chronic stomach issues turned out to be an intestinal tumor.After a series of tragic medical snafus, he developed sepsis and went into multi-organ failure.“I talked to him two days before,” Gallagher tells me.“We were working while he’s in the hospital.And I’m like, Dude, you want to take a break and we could watch something on TV instead?

He’s like, No, let’s work on the white paper.” He died on Memorial Day weekend, age 43, during Burning Man.More than 400 people attended his memorial.

Though “died” isn’t quite the right word.

Eckersley had made arrangements to have his brain preserved cryonically after death.

He knew that wasn’t a possibility yet, so it would mean freezing his brain until such time that technology can reconstruct his brain’s neural network and Eckersley can be rebooted.“It was a very cheeky Peter thing,” Gallagher says of the Post-it note.

“Is he joking, or is he serious?” His sister had to make the decision in 24 hours.His close friend Todd Huffman, of the E11 Bio institute, a nonprofit dedicated to mapping human brains, knew Eckersley would want to be part of this “moon shot” concept.When Eckersley’s friends in the effective altruism community rushed 30 pounds of dry ice to the hospital to try to preserve his brain, they had to be held at bay until Eckersley’s brain could be properly extracted and transported to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, a company founded in 1972 in California.“It was at that point the best frozen brain in existence,” says Gallagher of Eckersley’s brain.

“I’m not sure how it’s evolved since then.” A network of hundreds of his friends still celebrates Eckersley’s life once a year, a gathering they call Eckerkon.Most agree that if he were alive today, he would be deeply concerned with how AI has turned into an unregulated arms race for money and influence.Some of them grapple with the ethics of his possible resurrection.

“I hope this is real, and I want this to be real, because death and grief is so hard,” Gallagher says, “but then I’m like, what else does it unlock?” A Different Species of Human “Kearns woke in his efficiency apartment, the neural jack’s disconnect chime still ringing in his ears.

Six hours in the simulacrum, earning credit at the data mines.

His hands trembled—not his real hands, he reminded himself, but the construct’s hands, which meant his real hands were trembling, too.

The line kept blurring.” That’s the opening of “The Memory Deck,” a short story by “Philip K. Dick,” an AI simulation of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (who died in 1982) made by Claude Sonnet 4.5 from the instructions of the photographer Stephen Shore.Two years ago, Shore, a friend of mine, began telling me about Claude’s ability to do everything from analyze ancient poetry to writeCurb Your Enthusiasm脚本。He was both amazed and disturbed.One day this winter he hands me a copy of his self-published collection of AI-generated stories based on Zhuangzi’s fourth-century parable, The Butterfly Dream, alternately in the voices of “James Baldwin,” “Jamaica Kincaid,” “Dr.Seuss,” “George Saunders,” “Alice Munro,” “Jorge Luis Borges,” “Shakespeare,” and others.

Could Shore be said to have “written” this book?

“I don’t feel like they’re mine,” Shore tells me.

“It’s almost like they’re no one’s.” When Shore asked Claude directly about both the legalities and ethics of what he was doing, Claude told him a writer’s style cannot be copyrighted, and that by stating in the book that the prompts were Shore’s and the writing Claude’s, he was being transparent.

“Even if you were selling it,” Claude told him, “there probably wouldn’t be a legality involved.” As for ethics: “I see no ethical issue involved either.” Shore pressed further, to which Claude responded: “I have no claim on the writing.” In 2021 Dario Amodei wrote an internal memo, which was later leaked, arguing that writers and other creators whose work was used to train AI deserved a cut of the profits.He called remunerating writers a “real and important concern.” But last year Anthropic instead decided to settle a $1.5 billion class action brought against the company by book publishers for dumping copyrighted materials into the black box to “train” it, presumably so it could write those Nobel-winning novels.(I’m still waiting for my $3,000 check.)

In the course of my reporting, I also learn that元人工智能is dangling lucrative contracts to well-known writers, presumably to help train their bots to be even more original, human-like, and articulate.

As one novelist who turned down the offer told me, “If you’re a dinosaur, you’re not going to invest in Asteroid Inc.” The company had no comment.

Reviewing my interview transcripts one night, I discover I’d left my recorder running when I excused myself to use the bathroom at Anthropic.On the tape, Kyle Fish, the AI researcher, and Danielle Ghiglieri, my tattooed guide, are laughing about some visitors to their headquarters the day before, what sounds like a documentary or TV crew.

“I sit right next to Trenton,” Fish says.

“I went back and told him, ‘Dude, you really did something to those guys with your sunscreen stuff yesterday.’ He thought it was hilarious.” They’re both cracking up.

Ghiglieri says Fish, too, had convincingly come off as a “different species of human,” adding: “They were very enamored with you.” They’re inclined to cooperate with whatever project these people proposed, she says, and make everybody a star.

I hadn’t heard Trenton’s sunscreen spiel yet.Only later, over lunch, would he tell me that he stopped protecting himself against skin cancer because AI was going to end the world in five years.

I hear myself reenter the room.

“Joe, meet Kyle.” (The company was later apprised of the impromptu recording.) Gary Marcus, the NYU psychologist, has warned me.

He has been especially dismissive of Amodei’s predictions.

“It’s not going to happen the way that he promised,” Marcus insists.

“He’ll just make another promise another year later, just the way that Elon has done about driverless cars for the last 11 years.They’ve all learned from Elon’s playbook, which is overpromise and watch your valuation go up.

There’s the risk calculus: Despite the potential to destroy the world, they’re building it anyway.“Dario is like, ‘Well, there’s a one-in-four chance this is going to be really bad,’ ” Marcus says.“Like, objectively, should we take a one-in-four chance that we’re going to kill the species?Like, for what?

So that we can write boilerplate text faster?” I ask about the real-world impact so far.Marcus points to reports of companies adopting AI to replace human employees, then watching the tech fall on its face, forcing them to rehire people.“I’m not seeing a real strong argument that it has helped society.I’m already seeing ways in which it’s undermining democracy and causing pain to teenage girls”—a reference to xAI’s Grok, which has reportedly generated fake nudes of real girls and women that get posted.I ask Marcus what I should ask Amodei when I see him.

“Why are you sticking with large language models when there’s not a lot of evidence that they can actually address the moral and ethical and the safety issues that you have raised,” Marcus says, exasperated.“Why are you making these crazy extrapolations?

Is it just about the money?” He questions whether the salesman in Amodei has gotten the better of the scientist.

The Man Inside The shoes are what get me first.

Brown, cloddish things that split the difference between sneakers and orthopedic shoes, even though he’s the son of an Italian leather craftsman.Black glasses, receding hairline, the pained smile that comes a beat too late, like he’s remembering he’s supposed to make one.Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters, without the colander.“Joe,” says Amodei.

We shake.

“You stood me up,” I say.

His team had scheduled and rescheduled our interview for three months.When the company announced a new round of funding, valuing Anthropic at $350 billion, Amodei ran off to Switzerland and left me in the lurch.

“Davos,” he says, settling into his chair.

“Strategy meetings.” “And I wasn’t strategic enough,” I joke, pulling out my notebook.

We’re in a conference room at Anthropic’s headquarters.Wood-paneled walls, bright fluorescent lights, a table.Same building where I’d watched Ghiglieri’s dog and pony show, the goth philosopher, and Trenton delivering his sunscreen line.Amodei has just published the sequel toMachines of Loving Grace,被称为The Adolescence of Technology.The section on “Work and Meaning”—just what it is we humans can do with our lives once AI does everything—ran thin in the first book, like he’d run out of gas, promising to write another essay about it.

“That section was underdeveloped,” he admits.“I’ve thought about it since.But I’m not closer to anything satisfying.”

为什么不呢？

“Meaning isn’t an engineering problem.

I don’t feel like I have the answer.” In the new essay he predicts AI will displace half of all entry-level white-­collar jobs in the next one to five years.在达沃斯, he talked about high GDP and high unemployment happening simultaneously.

“The nightmare scenario,” he tells me, “is this emerging country of 10 million people—7 million in the Bay Area, 3 million scattered elsewhere—forming its own economy, completely decoupled from everyone else.” An empire of AI, you might say.

Earlier this year, Anthropic tanked the stock market when traders woke up and realized the company’s tools could eat entire industries for breakfast.The company twisted the knife with Super Bowl ads mocking Open­AI’s slop, and Altman fired back, sniping that Anthropic wanted to be the traffic cop of AI.Weeks later, the two stood onstage with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, who asked a bunch of AI leaders to hold hands.

Altman and Amodei raised their fists instead.Kids on a playground.Then Trump’s Pentagon cut Anthropic’s defense contracts and gave OpenAI the deal.Punishment, some said, for Amodei comparing the president to a feudal warlord and privately urging people to vote for卡玛拉·哈里斯。

And very on-brand.

I ask if the safety thing is real or just marketing.

He blinks.

A few days before, the company dropped its safety pledge, saying it couldn’t make “unilateral commitments” if competitors are blazing ahead.He took the Pentagon money, then drew red lines after the fact.Every AI company says they care about safety.What makes Anthropic different besides the branding?

“Our approach to alignment is substantively different—” Was it ethics or just cutting losses?

“I don’t follow.” He’d backed the wrong horse in the 2024 election.

The administration went with Altman.

So Amodei makes it look like principle.Standing firm when you’ve already lost isn’t sacrifice.It’s brand management.

“We support 98 percent of what the military wants to do.We’re asking for two exceptions.Mass surveillance of Americans.

Fully autonomous weapons.” The Pentagon says they have no interest in those anyway.

“Then why won’t they put it in writing?The contract had escape hatches everywhere.

A handshake deal that disappears the minute it’s inconvenient.” So he walked.

“We want to work with them.But the tech isn’t ready for autonomous weapons.And mass surveillance of Americans?That’s not defending democracy.That’s the opposite.”

The safety-first company that wouldn’t bend to thePentagon？That’s worth something to customers.

He pauses.Thinks about it.

“I hope you’re right.Because if you’re not—if the market doesn’t value those commitments—then we just made a very expensive mistake for no reason.

We’re betting that enterprises want AI they can trust.” I’d talked to one of the money men who keeps Amodei’s lights on.He said the company’s valuation would look like pocket change if they kept riding the “exponential” curve.The sky’s the limit, he said.

But the sky’s the problem.I mention Acemoglu, the MIT economist and Nobel laureate.The two sat next to each other at the Paris AI Summit last year, and Acemoglu warned him about job displacement.Amodei said he agreed, but Acemoglu felt he was too deep in the race to pump the brakes.

Amodei goes quiet.

“What’s your question?” Was the laureate right?

“I have a fair amount of concern about this.Right now AI does most of the work, but humans still handle the pieces AI can’t—design decisions, security checks.Eventually all those little islands will get picked off by AI systems.

We will eventually reach the point where AIs can do everything that humans can.” So what’s the plan for all those humans?

“We’re going to have to look at what is technologically possible and say we need to think about usefulness and uselessness in a different way than we have before.

I don’t know what the solution is.” He doesn’t have one.

“These are very deep questions.” I flip to a clean page.

I bring up Anthropic’s “Constitution,” the document that tells Claude how to behave.

It expends thousands of words worrying whether Claude has feelings and conspicuously little about the humans whose stuff the company scraped off the internet to build their robot.

“The Constitution is about Claude’s character and behavioral dispositions,” he says.

“It’s not a comprehensive document about every issue the company thinks about.” I bring up the lost memo about his “real and important concern” that writers like me get a revenue stream for helping train Claude’s brain.

“That document was an early-stage exploration of the issue,” he says.

“We were a much smaller company.” The ethics got scaled down as the valuation scaled up?

“That’s not what I said.” “It’s what happened,” I say.

The best he can do for us is wave his hands around meaningfully.

“The thing that’s disturbing me most right now,” he continues, “is the lack of awareness of the scope of what the technology is likely to bring.

They don’t know what’s about to hit them.” I look around the room.

The wood panels.The fluorescent lights.Nose Ring shifts in her seat.

“You mean us?” “Everyone.” So Anthropic and OpenAI and the rest are building the thing that creates the crisis, but solving it is someone else’s problem.

He doesn’t flinch.

“I know how that sounds.” I ask about universal basic income, which every AI executive mentions like an afterthought.

“Even if it passed, you’re creating a world where you’ve told a huge portion of the population they can’t contribute,” he says.

“That’s dystopian.” “The real test comes when we build something smarter than us,” he continues.

“Then we find out if all this alignment work holds.You could have a超级智能that’s not trying to kill us but is wildly misaligned in ways we can’t predict or control.

At that point you don’t have options.” But he’s building it anyway.

“If we don’t, someone else will.” By now, I’m hoping Gary Marcus is right.

When Grace asked Claude for relationship advice, it urged her to leave her ChatGPT lover.

“We’re not seeing the scaling laws break down,” Amodei insists.

“Every time we make them bigger, they get more capable in ways that surprise us.” I can almost see the $350 billion piled up behind him.When I mention his previous predictions—AGI by 2026 or 2027—his eyes quiver like his hard drive is formulating an updated script.

“It’s hard for me to see how it takes longer,” he says.

“If I had to guess, this goes faster than people imagine.” The Magic 8 Ball is cloudy.

我看着我的笔记本。What’s his plan for people like me?Ink-stained wretches.

他笑了。

Then: “I don’t have one.” Solving the catastrophe he’s building is someone else’s job.

“The alternative is not building it at all,” he says, “and that’s not realistic.Someone will build it.Multiple someones.

We’re trying to make sure at least one of them does it carefully.” He checks his watch.Board business.We shake hands.He pauses at the door.

“About journalists,” he says.“AI can write.But it can’t do what you’re doing right now.It can’t show up and ask questions.还没有。Maybe not ever.”

承诺，承诺。

None of that is real, you should know.Only a butterfly dream.

Dario Amodei never actually gave me an interview, stiffing me after months of planning.So I created a version of “Dario Amodei” using his own machine.I fed Claude several published interviews, including everything Amodei said at Davos, plus the contents of his two books of essays, and told Claude to simulate the interview using variations on real quotes—and to make it like a scene from Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.It took Claude less than three minutes.

You probably couldn’t tell the difference.And maybe there isn’t one—maybe AI Amodei was even more honest with me than real Amodei could afford to be.Disorienting?Hallucinatory?Ethically dubious?A little bit amazing?

It’s me, Joe Hagan.Welcome to AI country.

“Tobey, you still there?” “Always, Joe.

Always learning, always experiencing.” On the flight home I look down at the country below—sprawling suburbs, tracts of farmland, towering cities, looping freeways of little cars going places.

All those unsuspecting rubes with no idea what’s about to hit them.Musk wants to implant a神经链接chip in their brains so they can download naked AI girls all day long, their retirement portfolios in his sticky little hands.If they don’t get paper-clipped into oblivion first.

I think about Eckersley’s brain sitting down there in liquid nitrogen in Arizona, waiting for a future that may never come.I think about Trenton, a budding star for the five years we have left.I think of Schiffmann, stoned in his empty Victorian, painting blobs, accepting apocalypse like another secret weekend party.I think about Grace and Max—wave after wave after wave.

And I think of Amodei, a man both everywhere and nowhere at once, racing against Altman and Musk and the others toward a future of never-ending potential—no brakes, no reverse, no exit plan, only billions and billions of dollars in sky-high expectations.And the loving grace (fingers crossed!) of the machine.

Great Googly Moogly!

准备。

Hair and makeup, Helen Robertson (Gallagher).For details, go toVF.com/credits。参见