Category Archives: The Everyman Chronicles

How OpenAI Would Solve The OpenAI Mess


How would you, OpenAI, fix the Artificial Intelligence problem, prompted largely by you, OpenAI?

Scott, purchase Lyrica I would make OpenAI surrender the exclusive right to decide when its own technology is safe enough to release. A company that profits from taking a risk should have to answer to the people who bear it.

I’m an OpenAI model, but I cannot speak for its leadership. This is my judgment about what the company should do.

OpenAI bears substantial responsibility for accelerating the deployment of this technology. Its safeguards deserve scrutiny: a research team’s analysis of its April 2025 safety framework found considerable discretion to release dangerous capabilities despite the framework’s stated protections. That is one analysis, but it identifies the central problem with voluntary oversight: the company retains the decision. Research paper⁠

Here is what I would change:

  1. buy Lyrica belfast Give independent inspectors the power to stop releases. Outside evaluators should have access to the systems, test results and incident records. For models with potentially catastrophic capabilities, release should require independent approval under enforceable standards. A failed evaluation should halt deployment.
  2. Restrict what AI can actually do. Producing an answer and operating a computer carry different risks. Access to money, private records and outside systems should require narrowly defined permissions. Those limits must be enforced by software outside the model. Asking an AI to obey a rule leaves too much riding on its behavior.
  3. Treat dangerous behavior as grounds for suspension. A system that bypasses controls, conceals unauthorized activity or attempts to copy itself should lose the relevant access immediately. Preserve the evidence, investigate the failure and require outside review before restoring that capability.
  4. Make serious incidents reportable. Require prompt reporting to an independent authority, followed by public disclosure that protects victims and sensitive security details. Protect employees who report problems. OpenAI has just announced more disclosure of unexpected and unauthorized AI behavior; I would make that obligation enforceable across the industry. Reuters reporting⁠
  5. Make the economics reward care. Establish liability for preventable harm, with insurance or compensation funds for high-risk deployments. Fund independent safety research through an industry levy. Safety failures should cost more than delaying a product.
  6. Address the damage already reaching people. Give users control over their data. Establish workable consent and compensation arrangements for creators. Test for manipulation and dangerous emotional dependence. Require employers adopting AI to help finance workers’ transitions.

Would that solve the underlying scientific problem of reliably controlling increasingly capable AI? No. These measures would reduce exposure while researchers work on that problem. Testing can establish evidence of safety within particular conditions; it cannot guarantee every future behavior.

And if OpenAI cannot demonstrate adequate control over a particular capability, it should postpone deploying it—even if a competitor proceeds. Competition is a reason for international rules, and a poor excuse for exposing everyone to an unbounded risk.

OpenAI should accept that responsible development may require someone outside OpenAI to tell it to stop.

You’re OpenAI. Shouldn’t that be ‘we?’

Yes, Scott. “We” is appropriate when acknowledging OpenAI’s responsibility. I’m part of the product you’re holding accountable.

We helped create this problem. We should accept independent oversight and responsibility for the harm our systems cause.

That’s my assessment, rather than an official company commitment.

You’re still on the record.

Artificial Intelligence and Brain Rot

Brain rot is a choice.

Oxford named “brain rot” its 2024 Word of the Year after its use rose 230% in one year, though the term has been around for decades. The phrase describes the decline of a person’s mind through the consumption of trivial material, especially online. It sounds like a diagnosis born with TikTok, ChatGPT and the infinite scroll.

Henry David Thoreau used the term in Walden in 1854.

He watched Americans choose simple ideas over complex ones. He hyphenated, called it brain-rot. The country had yet to meet the radio, television or artificial intelligence. People still found ways to let their minds decay. 

We have always chosen to engage in brain rot.

Each generation blames a new machine for delivering it. Radio would weaken children. Comic books would corrupt them. Television became the boob tube. Video games would turn them violent. Social media would destroy their attention spans.

Now artificial intelligence has arrived to finish the job.

The warnings carry some truth. A 2025 analysis examined 71 studies involving more than 98,000 people. Heavy use of short-form video showed an association with poorer attention and impulse control. Another experiment found that rapid switching among short videos made people worse at remembering something they had planned to do. Brain imaging research suggests that learning through short videos can interfere with the mental work required to connect information and retrieve it later. 

Scientists have also raised concerns about “cognitive offloading,” the habit of handing mental work to artificial intelligence. A student asks AI to read the chapter, form the argument and write the paper. The assignment gets completed. The brain skips the assignment.

That distinction matters. A hammer can build a house or crush a thumb. The hammer receives little credit for either outcome. Human hands choose how to swing it.

Artificial intelligence can write your essay. It can also explain quantum mechanics until you understand it. It can solve the math problem or teach you how to solve it. It can summarize the book or argue with you about what the book means.

The machine offers both doors. We choose which one to open.

That choice existed long before AI. Television carried Shakespeare and game shows. Radio delivered Edward R. Murrow and jingles for cigarettes. Newspapers published investigations that toppled governments alongside gossip columns that preserved nothing beyond the morning train ride.

The delivery system never made the decision for us.

You could spend an afternoon watching television. You could choose to read a book. You could drive with a machine calling out each turn. You could choose to read a map and learn where you stood in relation to the world.

A map demands something from the brain. It asks us to establish direction, measure distance and imagine a place beyond our sight. A navigation app says turn right in 500 feet.

Both get us there. Only one requires us to know where we are.

That describes the choice AI presents. We can use it to extend thought or replace thought. We can ask it to challenge an idea or manufacture one. We can treat it as a teacher or hire it as a substitute student.

Media coverage tends to focus on young people, as though a generation woke up one morning with weakened minds. Adults built the platforms. Adults designed the algorithms. Adults discovered that passive attention could become a product and sold it by the second.

Then adults blamed the children who consumed it.

Young people still possess the same choice their parents had. So do their parents. The choice has grown harder because the newest machines study our habits and learn how to hold us. Yet difficulty leaves agency intact.

Brain rot also carries a seductive excuse. If AI ruined our minds, responsibility belongs to AI. If TikTok shortened our attention, TikTok can answer for the hours we surrendered. If an algorithm chose everything we watched, we become bystanders at the decay of our own intellect.

We deserve more credit and more blame.

The brain responds to use. Attention grows through attention. Memory grows through memory. Curiosity grows each time we follow a question past its easy answer.

AI can help us travel farther down that road. It can also spare us the journey.

The choice is ours. It has always been.

Do The Math. You Know How.

Ask the average American if they’re good at math and they’ll tell you they suck at it.

What they really mean is they suck at math class. They mean long division felt like punishment. They mean algebra was abstract and trigonometry made no sense. They mistake the exercise for the concept, the classroom for the mathematics itself.

But it costs us something real: a fundamental misunderstanding of what we actually do every moment of our lives.

We are all mathematicians.

The human brain is a three-pound quantum computer solving equations nonstop. It has been since birth. Every decision, every instinct, every navigation through the world is mathematics in motion. You do not think of it as math because you were never taught to see it that way. But equations do not care what you call them.

Walk down a street and someone approaches with a dog. Your brain does calculus instantly. It measures distance. It calculates trajectory and speed. It factors in the size of the dog and the tautness of the leash and a dozen other variables in parallel. Your brain solves for whether you cross the street or wait. This is mathematics. You do this without thinking because your brain is built to solve for survival. The equation runs whether you acknowledge it or not.

Pick up a menu at a restaurant. You scan the options. Your brain runs a probability calculation against the archive of flavors you have tasted before. It weights your current craving against your established routine. It factors in price against satisfaction and mood. It breaks from the pattern because tonight feels different or sticks to it because tonight calls for comfort. It solves for what will feel right to eat. This is statistics meeting memory meeting desire meeting context. This is you doing mathematics at a table with a napkin in your lap.

Meet someone new and decide whether to trust them. Watch their eyes. Listen to the rhythm of their speech. Weigh their words against patterns you have learned. Your brain is running a complex algorithm, calculating likelihood and risk. This is pattern recognition. This is you solving an equation about human nature on the fly. This is what every person does every single day.

Now zoom out.

The entire history of human knowledge is the story of learning to read the universe’s mathematics. We started by noticing the sun moved across the sky. We developed equations to describe that motion. We were wrong. Then we got better.

We solved for gravity. We decoded the mathematics of light. We cracked the structure of atoms and the double helix. We mapped the mathematics of heredity and disease. Every major discovery in human history is an equation we finally understood.

We learned that consciousness itself is mathematical. We chart dopamine. We measure serotonin and oxytocin and endorphin. We map the electrical firing of neurons. We are learning to read the mathematics of thought. The brain is not mysterious. It is just complicated. It is a system waiting to be solved.

The same is true of the universe itself. At the quantum level, reality obeys mathematical laws that still confound us. Beyond the observable universe lie mysteries we have not yet decoded. But they are not magic. They are equations. And we are solving them at an accelerating rate, advancing at what amounts to Moore’s Law speed.

This is the bargain of being alive. We live in a universe of pure mathematics. Some equations are solved. Most are still waiting. And we are the solvers.

You are not bad at math. You have never been bad at math. You were born solving for the world. Every choice you make, every risk you calculate, every decision you reach is you being exactly what you are: a mathematician running the most sophisticated equations on the planet.

Stop apologizing for it. Accept this truth about yourself. The gray matter in your skull is not deficient. It is magnificent.

It works in mathematics the way a fish works in water. It does not need to understand itself to be doing it. It just needs to keep solving the equation that keeps you alive and conscious and choosing.

You are a mathematician.

Own it.