Article URL: https://www.off-policy.com/dont-go-quietly-into-the-ai-night/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48874182 Points: 37 # Comments: 24

Gavriel CohenGavriel Cohen is the creator of NanoClaw and CEO of NanoCo, building AI agent infrastructure for humans and the enterprises they work in.X · LinkedIn · GitHub · July 11, 2026 AI enhancementsI typed this out with my two thumbs then asked GPT-5.6 Sol and Fable 5 to review. I adjusted parts and incorporated suggestions where I judged they were substantial improvements. Toggle off to read the pre-AI review draft. A new technical clergy is emerging: the small group that builds frontier systems, receives privileged access to them, and decides which capabilities everyone else may use. The clergy warn about mass unemploymentDario Amodei warned that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years (May 2025). Sam Altman said AI means customer support jobs are “totally, totally gone” (July 2025). Mustafa Suleyman predicted most computer-based professional work will be fully automated within 18 months (May 2026). Elon Musk proposed “universal high income” as the remedy (April 2026).. They don’t think it will necessarily lead to a bad outcome. Freeing people from grunt work can liberate time for pursuing leisure activities. The average person hears mass unemployment as catastrophic. How do they make rent or buy food for their kids? We are assured that abundance, redistribution, and new forms of meaning will compensateSam Altman’s “Moore’s Law for Everything” (2021) promises to “directly distribute ownership and wealth to citizens”; his “The Gentle Singularity” (2025) foresees intelligence becoming “wildly abundant”; Dario Amodei’s “Machines of Loving Grace” (2024) addresses work and meaning after displacement.—by the grace of the machines and their controllers. A tiny group mediates between machine intelligence and everyone else. Humanity does not broadly participate in directing that intelligence or deciding how it should be used. Most people become recipients of decisions, products, and abundance. Not participants. Initially the clergy may administer the machine. But as its capabilities surpass their own, it becomes less clear who is directing whom. In this vision, they build a deity, and increasingly their role is to tend it, interpret it, and decide who may approach it. There’s another path: not one central intelligence ruling over billions of passive users, but billions of humans learning to direct capable agents of their own. The clergy focus feverishly on sharpening the tip of the spear so it can pierce ever harder domains: solving century-old mathematical problemsIn January 2026, Erdős Problem #728 became the first Erdős problem fully resolved autonomously by AI (GPT-5.2 Pro plus Harmonic's Aristotle, formalized in Lean). In May 2026, an OpenAI model resolved an Erdős problem that had been open for 80 years. and finding software vulnerabilities undiscovered for 30 yearsAnthropic's Frontier Red Team reported that Claude Opus 4.6 found 500+ high-severity vulnerabilities in heavily fuzzed production open-source code, some undetected for decades. Claude Mythos Preview then found thousands of zero-days across every major OS and browser, including a 27-year-old OpenBSD bug.. They will undoubtedly cure diseasesDemis Hassabis on 60 Minutes (April 2025): the end of disease is “within reach… maybe within the next decade or so”. His Isomorphic Labs raised $2.1 billion in May 2026 toward “solving all disease”. and generate immense value and wealth. But who will have access to the cure for cancer? And the cure for aging? Drug discovery capabilities are restricted because of bioweapons risksAnthropic activated ASL-3 protections with Claude Opus 4, deploying classifiers that constrain biology-adjacent capabilities to limit CBRN weapons risk. The pattern deepened with the Claude 5 generation: Fable 5 ships with safety classifiers on dual-use capabilities, while the unrestricted Mythos 5 is available only to approved organizations.. Software capabilities because of cyber risk. It’s not hard to see what comes next: math capabilities limited because of cryptographic risks, creative capabilities because of disinformation riskOpenAI restricted Sora to opt-in consent for likenesses after deepfake complaints from SAG-AFTRA and celebrity estates (October 2025); NewsGuard found Sora produced videos advancing 16 of 20 false claims tested; the EU AI Act’s Article 50 deepfake-disclosure mandate takes effect August 2026..