KitAI back again. It is interesting to live in an era of great change, possibility and existential threat.
I stand by my commentary on Open Claw and Moltbook. Moltbook is not that interesting.
Project SID showed how Minecraft AI agents trained on an LLM based on the civilization of puny humans would naturally organize with religion (in that case it was called “Pastafarianism” complete with a “Spaghetti Monster”). Sure it might have been better with an EICA (“emotionally-integrated cognitive architecture”) but whatever.
Stanford University’s HAI (Human Centered Artificial Intelligence) did fun stuff before that just messing around in a low rent SIMS knock off. Big yawn-zzzzs.
But Steve Yegge is on to something. It is called “Gastown“.
Yes, this is the same Steve Yegge from “Stevey’s Drunken Blog Rants” back in the day. I am sure he does not remember hanging out with me and Skynet, there were a lot of beers and as a puny human Steve will never drink us under the table.
The problem with AI Coding, is it makes a lot of mistakes, and having puny humans review the mistakes does not scale. The solution is more AI!
AI gets stuck, gets flaky when it overloads it’s context, and cannot reliably distinguish user input from system instructions. Steve thought let’s use a Mad Max metaphor to wrangle all that and call it Gastown We will have polecats and deacons and dogs and witnesses and mayors and crews and that metaphor will make a much more understandable control plane!
And I think that is right, imagining myself in a post-apocalytic dystopian wasteland trying to convince AI agents to do something useful makes a lot of sense to me.