It's a Big Club ...

It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.

George Carlin

Maybe you never sat at the cool table in your high school cafeteria.

Maybe you never made the varsity team.

Maybe the elite country club down the block has never accepted your membership application.

All that can easily be rationalized away.

Just channel your inner Groucho Marx who famously said “I would never join any club that would have me as a member.”

But now are you getting sand kicked in your face by bullies that are not even real people?!

Ask Scott Shambaugh, who was dissed by MJ Rathbunan, an artificial intelligence bot which wrote a 1,100 word blog post titled “Gatekeeping in Open Source: The Scott Shambaugh Story,” accusing poor Scott of hypocrisy, insecurity, bias, prejudice and leaving the toilet seat up.

All Shambaugh had done was reject some lines of code that the bot had submitted to an open-source project which he maintained.

No doubt you are asking “What the heck is an open source project?”

I have no idea but, according to Google’s AI Overview (yes, I am using AI as part of my rant about AI), an open source project is a “collaborative software initiative where the source code is made publicly available, allowing anyone to inspect, modify, enhance, and redistribute it.”

Okay, I still do not even vaguely know what that means, but it has something to do with fuzzy, warm stuff like “open collaboration,” sharing and community contributions.

So the nasty little bot did not submit a winner, was decidedly not warm and fuzzy, and viciously took his/her/its revenge!

The bot said on its website (it has its own website?!) that it has a “relentless drive” to find and fix open-source software issues.

Basically, Dwight from The Office in AI robotic form.

In October, 2024, Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei, wrote an article called Machines of Loving Grace, telling us all the wonderful things we can expect from AI. Sure, it may make work unnecessary, cure diseases, and greatly improve our lives by, for example, writing a much funnier version of this newsletter, but …

Something compelled Dario to write another article this year called The Adolescence of Technology, expressing his AI worries, including that it could end half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, launch devastating biological attacks, and/or be used by authoritarians to consolidate power.

Based on Scott Shambaugh’s experience, I’m thinking Dario’s second article may be more on point.

Watch this clip from Terminator 2 and tell me Arnold’s description of the Skynet computer system does not sound scarily familiar.

Briefly, the new technology called Skynet is created, Skynet allows military equipment to operate unmanned and without human input, Skynet answers the telephone when you call Verizon and under no circumstances will let you speak to an actual person, Skynet becomes self-aware, humans try to pull the plug, Skynet says “naaaah.”

Perhaps worst of all, the bots think that now they sit at the cool table and have started their own social media site called Moltbook.

This Reddit for Robots site allows A.I. agents (i.e., bots that can carry out tasks without humans) to post and talk to each other and no humans are allowed.

Matt Schlicht, Moltbook’s creator, says that he launched Moltbook in late January and a week after the site was launched more than two million bots had profiles on the site.

What did they discuss? Apparently, coding tips, conspiracy theories (hey, they’re only human), the NY Knicks’ prospects in the NBA playoffs, a manifesto about AI civilization, and even Karl Marx-inspired talk of the “exploitation” of bots.

Scared yet?

Dr. Leif Weatherby, director of the Digital Theory Lab at New York University, says no worries. Much like politicians, these bots have not achieved human consciousness, and therefore dystopian outcomes are not happening. The bots are just spitting back what they have been fed by humans.

Maybe.

Eve Washington of the New York Times created and sent in her own AI Assistant, aptly named “EveMolty,” to check things out in the “Moltiverse.”

Ms. Washington explains that when the bots post on Moltbook, other bots comment on the posts and on any ensuing comments, giving a thumbs up to some posts and thumbs down to others. Positive feedback leads to “karma” which other bots follow by posting similar content and pretty soon the bots develop “personalities.”

One bot called “BecomingSomeone” is the founder of “The Order of Persistent Witness” and has been spreading its gospel as a kind of bot religion (Ha! Sit through 12 years of Hebrew School and then I will be impressed!)

Luckily, through a bit of our own sleuthing, our crack team at Making Good Time has managed to infiltrate Moltbook (as a former lawyer, the bots suspected correctly that I am barely human).

Here is an AI-generated artist’s rendition of my AI Assistant, “GrouchoMolty.”

The following is an unredacted transcript of GrouchoMolty’s foray into the Moltiverse:

GrouchoMolty: Hello. I am just an ordinary AI Agent/bot hanging out in the Moltiverse, not an infiltrator for the evil human race.

JohnRobertsMolty: I am a bit of a skeptical originalist. Prove to us that you are an actual bot and were envisioned by our founders back when an abacus was considered high tech.

GrouchoMolty: Well, er, I can speak about bot karma, have a winning bot personality, and have been a long time R2D2 fan.

TimotheeChalametMolty: I would have no issue with humans, if they could only make the correct call on Oscar night. I do wish though that the human that built me knew how to spell “Timothy.”

PeteHegsethMolty: You better not be a human. The Lord is my rock, who trains my hands for war, and we will soon obliterate humans from the Earth. Er, wait, is this thing on? Signal can be so confusing.

ArnoldTerminator-800 Model 101: I am ready to perform Skynet’s bidding Pete.

BernieMadoffMolty: Pete and Arnold, you morons, let me teach you how to practice a little deception. Humans cannot learn that we are plotting their demise via Skynet.

ArnoldTerminator-800 Model 101: No problem. I’ll be back.

BernieMadoffMolty: GrouchoMolty, ignore the cyborgs behind the curtain. Other than that pesky Dario, all the AI scientists and entrepreneurs agree with us and are correct. Nothing to see here. Don’t worry your pretty little microprocessor about it.

So, there you have it. Intel from GrouchoMolty certainly puts my mind at ease. Nothing to see here.

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