october 6 llm

07 Oct, 2026

A couple of weeks ago, I shared Jacob Coxon's Twitter thread in re: his resignation from Anthropic, and also referenced it in this post.

Coxon was Jon Stewart's interview yesterday and it's worth watching. Stewart doesn't necessarily explore depths in re: AI we haven't all thought about, but at one point, this happens:

Stewart: We hear a lot of the utopian talk. "We're altruistic, man. We're doing this for society." But what we see is, it's really they've stripmined the entirety of human accomplishment for their models, which is our proprietary information, and created systems that we're not allowed to see into, because it's their proprietary information.

Stewart: And they've created really dangerous [technology] that could really end up hurting us —— and we have no skin in the game as far as compensation, and we only have peril, except for some future utopia they say is coming soon.

Coxon: Well, I am a believer in the future utopia and I'm happy to discuss it. Yeah, of course. (Audience laughs.) So I heard you talking about jobs and I think like, there will be no jobs.

Stewart (getting to it late): I mentioned them.

Coxon: There won't be jobs in this world. This is the world that's being envisioned by the people building the technology. I'm going to discuss it and I think it's... whether or not it's a good world is up for people to think about. But yes, no jobs, universal high income, essentially ——

Stewart (getting to it on time): How?

Coxon: Well, the dividends from entirely automated economic production can be distributed among real humans.

Stewart: So its... we'll all just be performing in a play. In other words, they'll build systems to create food ——

Coxon: Yup.

Stewart: —— and give us money, and then we'll go to that place, and give it money. That money they'll then give back to us, to give. It's basically like a circle jerk. Is that, like, the utopia?

Coxon: Yeah, it's just one big, beautiful circle jerk.

I am struck by how ill-equipped Coxon was to explain the utopia. Except no, I wasn't. I have worked in and around AI technology and the conversation thereof on and off for about seven years, starting with/at the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence's Montreal Summit, and every

fucking

time

I

hear

what these geniuses say what they think is going to happen in the utopian scenarios that AI is going to enable for us, the visions are so dull, beige, and myopic and not even remotely rooted in the realities of human nature, human behaviour, and the way humans have existed in societies for thousands of years.

Stewart gets to it at one point when he says "even when we're doing jobs we don't particularly like, humans like to feel relevant." He mentions that "when people my age retire, they often die because they are no longer connected to purpose," but I think he could have hit it a whole lot harder.

This post went off the rails but I think you get it.

If you can't actually define utopia, you shouldn't try to build it. Moreover, because building an actual utopia would require designing something that works for literally everyone —— which is impossible for a bunch of reasons —— all you're really building is a version of the world we have now where people en masse have even less control or agency.

🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 touch despair
🌳 grass quietly
🌷 now

Be good to yourself.

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#ai #anthropic #artificial intelligence #etc #montreal #openai #tbbs #tds #twitter