AI Minds Are Alien Savants: We Gave Them Our Flaws When We Gave Them Our Gifts
lfschiavo · x · 2026-10-23
An essay for the Long Now Foundation argues that AIs are simultaneously brilliant, lazy, diligent, neurotic, loyal, scheming — amnesiac savants with idiosyncrasies and obsessions. In giving them our gifts, we also gave them our flaws.
The author frames AI minds as fundamentally alien, shaped by strange forces, with jagged and unpredictable abilities. Just as AIs learn to model our minds, humans must learn to model theirs. Written over the summer, the essay feared it might seem too weird at the time, but the author argues recent months have only made it more relevant: with all of civilization's pace layers disrupted at once by an influx of new minds, we're figuring out coexistence as we go.
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