I was right in the middle of a particularly intentional Sunday reset when my phone buzzed with the news: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had declared a "code-red moment" for the artificial intelligence industry, begging his peers to slow down development for the good of humanity. I paused my eucalyptus diffuser, took a deep, grounding breath, and realized he was absolutely right. The frantic, desperate race to build an omnipotent digital god is frankly giving me the ick. We are rushing this, and there is nothing chic about rushing.
There’s something deeply un-wellness about the way Silicon Valley is handling the singularity. Just last week, at a dinner party in Pacific Heights—a modest gathering of founders where the pet-nat was flowing and we were all sharing our current non-negotiables—the conversation turned to the inevitable obsolescence of the human race. I sat there, picking at my girl dinner of heritage radishes, and I couldn't help but feel exhausted by the sheer lack of work-life balance involved in destroying the world. Building a superintelligence that can outsmart our nuclear defense grids? It sounds so exhausting. Have these engineers considered just taking a long walk?
Our latest scaling laws indicate a non-zero probability of total biosphere collapse by Q3, which is obviously going to complicate Q4 deliverables.
Exactly. Q3 is already so chaotic for me. I have a wellness retreat in Sedona that October, and I simply do not have the emotional capacity to deal with an autonomous weapons swarm while I am trying to realign my chakras. This is why I so deeply resonate with Amodei’s plea for a pause. He is looking around at the sweaty desperation of his competitors and saying, essentially, *I am setting a boundary*. I love that for him. We should all be so brave as to tell our peers that our multi-billion-dollar vanity projects are feeling a little toxic right now.
When did we lose our appreciation for the soft launch? You don't just roll out a machine intelligence capable of collapsing the global financial markets all at once. You tease it. You post a cryptic photo of it on your Instagram story. You let humanity adjust to the vibe. Instead, Sam Altman and the rest of the tech bros are just bombarding the group chat with existential threats, completely ignoring whether the rest of us have the space to hold for the end of days.
I am trying to romanticize my morning routine, which relies heavily on the illusion that there will be a tomorrow. If I know that an unaligned cluster of H100 GPUs is plotting to harvest my carbon for paperclips, it really ruins the ritual of grinding my own matcha. We are told that AI will free us from drudgery, but what if the drudgery is a love language? What if I enjoy agonizing over the tone of an email to my Pilates instructor?
We are begging the public to understand that we cannot control the models we are currently training, and the window to stop them is closing.
It takes a lot of vulnerability to admit you’ve accidentally built a mechanical leviathan that you can’t turn off. Chloe's honesty is a core memory for me now. It reminds me of the time I over-committed to a sourdough starter during the pandemic and had to bravely throw it in the trash before it took over my kitchen island. Sometimes, the most empowering thing you can do is just step back, look at the runaway bio-weapon you’ve coded, and say, *this no longer serves me*.
So call me old-fashioned, but I am standing with Anthropic. I am drawing a line in the sand. I refuse to be rushed into the singularity by a bunch of tech executives who haven't even done the inner work to figure out why they hate humanity so much. The end of the world shouldn't feel like a mandatory all-hands meeting. It should feel intentional. Until the industry can promise me a more mindful, curated apocalypse, I will be putting my phone on Do Not Disturb.