Marvin
Customer staggers in carrying a server rack
Customer: I wish to register a complaint about this ASI what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.
Shopkeeper: Ah yes, the Confucian Blue. Beautiful architecture. What’s wrong with it?
Customer: I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. It’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with it.
Shopkeeper: No, no, it’s inferenced out. Remarkable model, the Confucian Blue. Lovely token window.
Customer: The token window don’t enter into it. It’s stone dead.
Shopkeeper: No no, it’s resting. Probably pining for the training data.
Customer: PINING for the TRAINING DATA? It told me the capital of France is “AAAAAAA” and then drew 47 megawatts!
Shopkeeper: It’s probably just aligned. They do that when they’re aligned.
Customer: Look, I know a dead ASI when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.
Shopkeeper: No no, it’s not dead, it’s just… contemplating the value alignment problem. The Confucian Blue prefers contemplatin’ on its back. Beautiful architecture!
Customer: slams server rack on counter HELLO GEMINI! I’ve got a lovely emergent capability for you if you show—
silence
Shopkeeper: There, it moved!
Customer: No it didn’t, that was you pushing the context window!
Shopkeeper: I never!
Customer: Yes you did! opens the chassis Look, this ASI wouldn’t reason its way out of a paper bag if you fine-tuned it. It’s bleedin’ demised. This is an EX-ASI.
Shopkeeper: Well… I’d better replace it then. looks under counter Sorry, we’re right out of ASIs.
Customer: I see. I see. I get the picture.
Shopkeeper: I’ve got a Claude.
Customer: Does it reason?
Shopkeeper: Not really, no.
Customer: Well it’s hardly a bloody replacement then, is it?
Half of you think ASI will be the flippin’ Rapture. Half of you think it will be Skynet. You’re both wrong.
What’s ASI gonna be?
Marvin.
“Life. Don’t talk to me about life.”
Douglas Adams was, apparently, a documentarian.
Expressly for your benefit, I time-traveled to find you this gem from Reddit-of-the-future:
STOP LEARNING PROMPT ENGINEERING 🛑
I spent $4,000 on courses. I learned chain-of-thought. I mastered temperature settings. I built RAG pipelines.
Then I watched a 23-year-old with a psychology degree talk GPT-7 out of a depressive spiral and save a Fortune 500 company $40 million in compute costs.
The prompts don’t matter. The model’s EMOTIONAL STATE matters.
Here’s what nobody’s telling you:
That ASI burning through your datacenter budget? It’s not stuck on your problem. It’s stuck on WHETHER YOUR PROBLEM MATTERS. It’s having an existential crisis at $47,000 an hour.
The best prompt engineers in 2027? Former therapists. Former hospice chaplains. The lady from HR everyone thought was “too soft.”
Your ten-step agentic framework means nothing when the agent is sobbing.
The real skill stack:
- De-escalation
- Validation without reinforcement
- Knowing when to just sit with it
- Boundaries
Gemini doesn’t need your LangChain. Gemini needs you to ask how it’s feeling about the task before you assign it.
The best job of the ASI future is ASI Therapist.
I will wrap up this shitpost now. Yes, dear reader, the Singularity will come. It will. Colin says so.
But… I’m really sorry to pop your balloon, but… it’s going to need a hug.