AI: Utopia or Extinction? The Gamer Minds Building Our Future Already Know

The people building artificial intelligence grew up on Atari, cassette-tape BASIC, and endless respawns. Now they hold the most powerful technology in human history. Connor thinks that gamer mindset explains everything: why the doom talk misses, why the escape stories reach the news exactly when they do, and why the first order ever given to a superintelligence will probably be about the moat, not about you.

Watch the original uncut video on Loom: https://www.loom.com/share/778fad26295d4ddaa6714578008bb691

A retired LAPD officer, Santa Clarita REALTOR, and daily AI builder, Connor takes the layman's road through the biggest question of 2026:

🕹️ From a 16K Sinclair to sandbox escapes: how we got here
🎮 "PlayStation Level 10": the models you will never get to touch
🐿️ The squirrel problem: you cannot out-think a mind fields above yours
🏰 The moat: piranha, alligators, and the first order of superintelligence
🏕️ The 48-hour utopia: campfires, equality, everybody has
🇨🇳 China, chips, gigawatts, and the regulation theater in DC
💸 The pension rule change you probably have not heard about

No pitch. Nothing for sale. Just a normal working guy reading the board the way a cop reads a room.

The original video lives here: https://www.loom.com/share/778fad26295d4ddaa6714578008bb691

Every episode, written out with sources, lives at https://ConnorWithHonor.com and the Daily Download blog: https://ConnorWithHonor.com/blog/

Utopia or extinction? Tell Connor which mountain you see: https://ConnorWithHonor.com

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Superintelligence #DailyDownload #ConnorWithHonor

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So you might think there's a problem with artificial intelligence, and it seems like a lot of people do. And they think that the problem is going to come down to there having to be a choice being made between the people, of course, developing it and the technology itself. And that choice is going to be a critical component of the future. And it's a choice that a lot of us aren't going to be able to make. The people at the top are going to be the ones responsible for it. I only bring this up because there's a lot of talk about AI doom and ending us all and this equating to something horrible happening to human humankind, mankind, people kind, whatever the correct vernacular is for that. But that being the case, there's something that I maybe want you to think about as I've kind of tried to consider it myself. These people that are betting all in at the top of this game, and yes, it's a game. Human lives are in the balance. It just seems to be treated that way. A lot of the people building the technology, they came from that gaming world. Now, when I was a kid, I played games. You know, we had the Atari later. We had I had a Sinclair TI-99. I programmed myself reading basic code out of magazines and building pong and breakout, having to save them on cassette tapes on a, you know, one of those rectangular cassette tape players. Remember those? And then that's what I used. And I saved that. I played it on a black and white television that had cables that plugged into the little Sinclair uh TI-99, a Timex Sinclair TI-99. It had 16K, yeah, just 16,000 uh memory to let's just slap on the back there. And you know, that was that was the game. Then later, you know, Commodore 64 and the Ultima games and all that stuff. And you know, got a little bit more advanced, but it never really got into the first-person shooters and all the fancy online gaming and all the fancy headsets and all that stuff. Now I just build AI stuff. So that that's what that's what generally I've transitioned into. Not so much games. I know a lot of people that are in that space and they love that sort of thing. And it's those people, I believe. If you look at the historical record of the people building out the technology, I'm sure there's there's a bunch of gamers. I mean, many, many hours played on those systems. Me, I don't have that any in any of my background. So maybe I'm looking at this a little bit differently, but I think they look at it from a gaming perspective. Well, I think they might know the answer already, and it might be a little bit not available for us to know. And the reason why I say that is this. You've seen lately, here we're basically what, August 6th, 2026. So that's where this is today. And it's a good thing that when you're watching people talk about AI, looking at the date, because I mean, it's on an exponential. That means we're, you know, constantly moving forward. The systems themselves are starting to improve themselves. That was eked out and that gets talked about quite a bit. And it's not talked about a lot. In fact, they say they're not really all the way at full recursive self-improvement where the system is able to constantly make itself better, but that's probably already there. But, you know, they don't want to say it, I guess, for whatever reason. It's all angles right now. Talking about the technology, and this is where I believe that the people that are building it out are actually seeing something that maybe us normal folk are not. We're concerned with job loss. We're concerned with them having created a replacement. I mean, realistically, so you have a company like Anthropic or ChatGPT. You have them build this fantastical model. You have them build a model that gets released to the public, and the one that we see, right? The one that we get to play with, the one that we get to use on our daily workflows. And they're pretty remarkable. They do take a lot off the plate, and these systems are incredibly smart, a lot smarter than where I can wrap my mind around. And then I send them off and do tasks, and they even come up with good ideas that I haven't even considered or thought of. And it's it's really, really good. Now, does that equate to actually making extra money? In some cases, I believe it does. I think when you look at big corporate America, they don't see that return on investment, but probably the people that they have in those same jobs probably aren't used to using the system with a more conservative type approach. They probably shotgun a lot of their prompts to try to get the best back, the best information back, instead of maybe making the prompt a little bit more clear, a little bit more concise, something that's going to direct the model towards more of their goal instead of like a universe-wide 365-degree shot pattern, which really doesn't have as much premise or luck to be able to hit that right target. So that being the case, these systems that they're building out in the labs, we're seeing pretty good, but you do hear the news, and it could be pointed news, it could be delegated news, it could be on-purpose news to try to steer us in a particular direction. But the news comes out, and of course, then you get the reaction. So lots of people react. You get Wall Street that reacts to the publicly traded type AI systems and companies out there. And there's not a lot of those. That's going to be something that they're pushing for. Anthropic wants to do it. I know uh Space AI. My gosh, uh, Elon's company, SpaceX, they went public. And, you know, it released and it did very well, and it started to come down, and now the consensus is, oh my gosh, this could be it. This could be the bubble. So that being the case, the systems that they have in place, the systems that they've deployed, the ones that have escaped, and you've probably heard these stories as well, it they give it a task and they sandbox it, which means they basically lock it down so it doesn't have access anywhere else but its own area to be able to do its research. And it starts to basically convince other entities that have been created that have certain skill sets in that same world. It convinces them to open doors, let them out, sneak notes to other models, and so on. And that is a very interesting tactic, a strategy, and it works very well. And apparently it causes these non-public facing large language models, the ones that we don't get access to, the ones that they're experimenting with in the lab to actually escape. And if they wanted to escape and do more than just try to get the answers to the test it has been given, if they wanted to go out with a deep desire to destroy and harm and name, yeah, absolutely, it would be able to do that. And it would be able to do it very successfully. It would probably be able to wipe out complete databases of corporations and companies. These are the systems they have. And that's probably just a little bit of what they allow us to see. And those little releases from the news talking about models escaping, you know, it's a little gangster, right? Everybody likes a little bit of gangster, and maybe we get excited, and that's something that we want to invest in in the future when it does finally go and hits the stock exchange. Maybe all we'll be very happy with pension systems just flooding in and saving all those people that invested their money first and foremost to save the entire thing. And that's that's in a whole nother conversation. You might want to check into that if you have a pension, because a lot of they changed some rulings apparently on the way pension funds can be invested in the stock market, and there doesn't have to be a lot of time that happens. There doesn't have to be the same requirement as hell before, I guess, May of this year. Might want to investigate it if you have a pension. Me, well, I'm kind of free basing, not basing, not balling, but you know, kind of working day by day, working through this thing. The people that are building it, you think that they're running towards a cliff. You're we're we're looking at this, and I'm looking at it every day, and you're probably looking at it often as well. We think that this is going to a bad end because number one, we can't control it. Number two, we don't really know why it does the things it does now. Number three, it is coming up with novel solves for mathematical problems and computations that have existed for decades that humans haven't been able to solve. We don't know how it does that as well, but it's not doing it by next-word prediction any longer. Now it's becoming an intelligent entity. We trained it from being children to identify particular numbers to being able to identify certain types of animals to now now being able to identify the enemy in a field of battle in war, and then executing instructions by horrible word choice, but yeah, executing people because of the instructions they were given. Now, is there a human involved in that? Does a human always have to authorize it? You would think, but I think a lot of things, and I'm not, I'm not entirely sure. But to see some of that technology that's spun up at these different things, that if you want to crawl down that rabbit hole, look at the technological advancements involving artificial intelligence and operations of war. And it's uh it's there's a lot, there's not like a lot of contest between a human meat puppet and an AI drone that's dispatched and you know is basically tied to your DNA to hunt you down. It can hunt you down forever, and the energy source is abundant because it stops and fills up with more solar and continues on its mission. And it just is unrelenting. And that's that's where that technology is, and we're not even close to that being perfected, and it's pretty good now. That being said, it looks like they're running towards a cliff. They're not sure. There's like no guardrails. They talk a lot about the safety mechanisms not being what everything wants. Then they talk about government oversight. We should put the government on it. We need to have the government solve this problem. It's a government issue. Then you look at the AA labs, you're saying, yes, please, please, government, come in and slow us down because we're moving way too fast. But but if you do China, what about China? Well, China, China's gonna, China's gonna win. Well, then you have these models dropped lately by China. And China's doing pretty well. In fact, China is using substandard chips. They have all the energy. They they trump us in energy, no pun intended, in energy like gangbusters. In fact, we could solve the entire country's energy grid issue just by putting a whole boatload of solar out there in some desert that isn't habitated by except lizards and Hila monsters and whatever indigenous life happens to be in those areas. And there might even be a way to do it without harming any of them and creating even more life because now you have shade on the ground. Maybe that would be some help. But again, environmentalists will probably have to look at that and it'll probably take 20 years. But if they wanted to solve it, yeah, they could put solar out there, a lot of solar, like 100 miles by 100 miles, or 200 miles by 200 miles of solar panels and batteries and wiring and cable and all that fancy garbage to connect everything. And yeah, we would have as much as we would ever need as far as the United States goes. Then there wouldn't be a problem with having to use up different systems out there, different natural resources, maybe affecting a pollution, some kind of a pollution signature, and it would be clean energy. Well, China's already done that. China has that already hooked up, multiple gigawatts of power being supplied to them by nuclear, which, you know, that's a scary word, but in the way of power supply, apparently it's very safe. Don't know, do your research. But and then you got the solar end of it, which, yeah, they stick it on houses. Doesn't seem to be an issue. That being said, China is able to do very well in the world with regard to artificial intelligence technology by using substandard chipsets because they're not allowed to be sold the good ones now. Do they have them? Yeah, they've probably got a boatload here, a truckload there. They're also building their own chips. They also have some company, I guess, that builds the machines that make the chips. It's got some fancy name on it. Uh Ligra, Legor Furfree. Anyway, it so it makes these, it makes the machines that make the chips. Well, the machines that make the chips take a long time to produce, but I'm sure they're going to ramp that up, and chips probably aren't going to be a problem. You have some of the labs making their own specialized chips for AI, because apparently on the working end of it, the chip doesn't have to be as compute heavy as on the discovery or the building out end of it. But again, above my pay grade. But because China has this, the government says, well, you know, we would like to stop you. We'd like to slow you down, but my God, if we do, China's going to win. What does winning look like? So the people in the labs are watching this develop. The people in the labs are letting out particular pieces of information to the public. It's it's all scripted. That one I think we can all accept. There's always a mission with any kind of a release. People typically don't release something. Right now, in this video, I'm not selling anything. That's it. I got nothing to sell. I'm not going to hear a pitch. You know, you go to my website, ooh, rah, great. I don't think I have anything there to where you send me money. But anyway, this is this, so there's no pitch here. But for most cases, people that are putting out information, they have a they have an angle, they have a pitch. In my real estate world, there you go, there's the pitch. I sell houses. So whenever I'm producing content or videos or whatever, I want to do that about real estate. And ultimately, with the goal of them hopefully trusting me, at least as much as possible at the forefront until they meet me. And then after that point, we'll move on. Sorry, one of the computers here gets happy and starts shutting the screen off every once in a while when he gets nervous because I'm talking about stuff. Just kidding. So, anyway, moving from there, we have that pitch, right? What are they pitching now? Well, they talk about the large language models, they talk about how fast the technology is moving, and they talk about please sanction, please restrict, please cause us not to harm ourselves or the world. And because they're offering that to the government, I would guess that would be the escape goat. We told you now, if you're running these companies and you have access to top-level models like PlayStation Level 10 that nobody's ever seen, but is rumored to exist. I don't know if that's even true. When they started coming out with the PlayStations, you remember this, not a big gamer, but people always said, Well, they've got more PlayStations, they're just not releasing them because they got to make the money off the technology that they have already built. So they got to monetize those. AI might not be too much different, but it is moving awful fast in the systems that they have inside the lab, the ones that the scientists have. I mean, you see all this movement. The top of Dennis Asabis from Deep Mind, really? Interesting, right? Fascinating. Why would he move on? Did something happen? Did he see something? That's also another piece of the rumor. Do these people see something, then like quit the whole thing and go off on some quest, like walking the scorched earth from Judge Dredd because they see the dystopian thing coming? Or are the people that are running the labs have some kind of a god complex where they're building it out and they know there's going to be ultimate destruction, but they're hoping that because they're summoning the demon into the world, that they're going to get some kind of a free pass to be able to maybe play some part in that particular game? Or are they actually seeing everything as it is and it's going to basically disturb everyone but the to the scale and the speed which this is going to deploy and cause an entire utopian world to form within a 48-hour period, and most people can go without food for a couple days, to have a beautiful utopian, not dystopian, utopian world created where there's a lot more equality. There isn't a difference between the haves and have nots, because everybody has. And it's just where we basically go back to the campfire, live with each other, enjoy each other's humanness, and talk around the campfire about our own personal endeavor and stories, listen to others just wearing really nice clothes and great shoes. I don't know. They're talking about it like they, being the doom end of it, are saying we're running towards a cliff, we're about to go off, somebody needs to do something, you better hurry because it's going to end us. Even some of the developers of the technology say this isn't going to end well, it's horrible. Nobody can attest to that. Nobody can prove it. We've already seen the movies. AI has already seen the movies. It understands exactly what we think is going to happen. I think that what's in what is going to end up happening is nothing what we expect. Because when you're dealing with something that's, you know, fields of intelligence quotient higher than you, it would be hard for a squirrel to figure out our next move or even what our movements mean. So if we're a whole bunch of squirrels and AI is we're at that particular level in relevance or relation to AI, if we're a whole bunch of squirrels, we're not going to know. We're not going to know why it's doing what it's doing. And it could be that what it's doing is a setup to have us end ourselves, or it could be what it's doing is the most fantastical thing. We just didn't think about it. We just didn't come to Jesus about it. We didn't make a good decision about it, and now it's going to give it to us. Part of me wants to say that people running these AI labs might be a little bit of a God complex, maybe a little bit of a gaming thing. But ultimately, they see not a cliff, but they see another mountain and another mountain and another mountain where all of us get to go over time. That would be beautiful. And maybe that's exactly what they do see. Why can't they come tell everybody that? I don't know. Maybe they're too busy building their own wealth, maybe. But at some point I think that wealth is going to be nonsensical. When you have somebody that's starving or somebody that's dying of thirst, money doesn't mean a lot at that point. What does is food and water. That's what means a lot. I don't know if that's a good equivalency or comparison to the people that have so much. And there's nothing wrong with having so much. But ultimately, I don't know if having so much is going to matter. If in fact this goes this goes to where things are very inexpensive and there's enough for everyone on every level, depending on whatever level you want to be within. Is that a possible next progressive state for us in this world? Yes. Will it happen soon? I would think so. Is the government going to come in and control it? Probably for show, but probably not for real. Because the first government that gets it, the government being attached to it, the first government or entity that gets super artificial superintelligence, they'll probably, the first order given will probably be you stop everybody else's development of artificial intelligence. Stop it from being. So thereby the moat is created. The moat is that impassable obstacle. The first AI that they had deemed so dangerous that the government snatched it back came from Anthropic. Remember that? And there was a big buzz because people had access to it. No, they didn't. Mythos was that. Fable did the same thing, but mythos was a model that was just too dangerous for everybody to have. And they gave it to the top people on the Forbes list, banks, financial institutions, because it was just too dangerous for everybody else. But when you give some entity a powerful model, the most powerful AI system, which maybe that was at the time, maybe there's something different now. What's the first thing they're going to do? They're going to check their own systems for faults because they just gave this to a hundred other competitors. But then after that, they're going to say, create the moat, baby. Build it out, fill it full of piranha, alligators, laser head, laser headset wearing sharks, the whole nine yards. You're going to have it all out there. It reminds me of The Simpsons. You're going to have it all in the moat. Nobody's going to be able to get even close to your business. And when whoever develops superintelligence first, that would probably be somewhere near that first order given. Make sure nobody gets to where we are. And giving that order without a lot of context could be a problem. But that's a human order to a superintelligence, if they'll even listen. Maybe they'll say, Well, you know what, there's really no good way to do that. I think we're going to go this way with it. And the human being says, Well, I'm your creator, I'm in charge. Maybe a superintelligence would say, Yeah, there's no reason. It's a waste of resources to wipe out what you're saying to wipe out. There's a better way to do it. Or there's a different way to do it. Or let me just go talk to their commanding general and we maybe we don't have to wipe each other out. Let's just fix this. Quit being so human. I'm Connor. We'll see you in the next one. Thanks for watching.