I was looking through a hard drive of mine when I found my old Google archive from my K-12 school account, and with it, some writing I did back then. I've collated three relevant pieces here along with a little analysis given the benefit of hindsight. The original downloads were OOXMLs, but I've converted them to markdown; the text is otherwise exactly as it was.

High School

In late 2022, when I was 16 and in my senior year of high school, OpenAI released ChatGPT. Having only played with GPT Playground at that point, I remember feeling like my future was about to change dramatically. I followed neither LessWrong nor Slate Star Codex, but I managed to stumble upon some similar threads. I was taking a creative writing course that year, and this piece I wrote for it summarizes my thoughts at the time.

Written late 2022 to early 2023. Previously published in a class anthology (Fractured: An Anthology of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, ISBN 9789811871597).

Clear

CENTRAL OVERALL SUMMARY - REVIEW OF REPORTS

That infernal paragraph. That modest proposal that ignited the end of humanity. So few words that would ruin so many. I can’t help but read it again.

July 27th, 2039 / Opinion: You’re Missing the Point of Artificial Intelligence

Randy Powell

Ever since brain-chips took off, we’ve heard the same gloomy complaints, that A.I. has made us obsolete. You can either take advantage of this, or go extinct. Sure, you can mope around and live in a shack in the middle of the woods for as long as you want, but here’s a reality check: since 2035, there is no category in which a human can beat an A.I. I say, why fight it, when we can embrace what comes next? Farming meant we didn't have to hunt anymore. Today, A.I. means that we don’t have to read, write, draw, walk, talk, hear, see, even breathe anymore. Just by freeing us from the burden of hunting, agriculture let us develop cities, countries, industry, and eventually, electronics. Now, imagine how far we can go if we just embraced A.I. , if we gave up on our vain right to make subpar decisions, if we let something built to do our jobs—better than we ever could—fulfill its purpose.

Imagine.

If only Randy had known what would come out of his piece. The conquest, the purges, the forced implantations… all this, for development? So many “humans”, reduced to being all the same. I snap back to the present. Another day of combing through reports, searching for a spark of hope that’ll never come. Believe me, I’ve been trying to do what I can for a while now. It started out small at first—steal some old brain scans, whip something out of anything I could make sense of, sneakily upload it into some poor stranger’s brain. When I say nothing worked, I mean it in every sense of the word. When they didn’t immediately die, they came out even less human, somehow. But I kept going. I opened the first report.

ANDERSEN, PETER, SUBJECT #213 - DAILY REPORT

I was awoken by the 6:00:00 alarm. I got out of bed and showered. I saw a bird pick up a twig. I took the train to CHM-IL station. I walked to a metal door. I tapped my card on the reader. I entered the bunker. I found my daily nutritional paste. I drank it. I savo—

I—

I awoke in the cafeteria. I walked to my workstation. I read my tasks. I was first instructed to replace hard drives in rack 283. I retrieved the hard drives. I made my way to the racks.

I thoug—

I th—

I—

I was awoken by a nurse in a hospital bed. I was informed that I had collapsed during a shift at work. I took a nap.

Peter, one of the first I uploaded. Back when I first thought I could really rebuild humanity. It took years of work, of deaths and experimentation. The guilt of killing so many was only outweighed by the knowledge that as far as I knew, I was the last hope for humankind. I had to press on. I could get them to walk, talk, live their lives, so close to the way things were before, but I was always never quite there. No matter what I tried, something was always missing, something inherent to humanity that you couldn’t recreate. Everything I made would eventually show its flaws, its artificiality. I’m not sure what’s left to try. I opened the next report.

SZOLD. EMANUEL, SUBJECT #54,213,234- DAILY REPORT

I woke up to the chirping of birds. One of them was perched on my window, and had been making quite a racket. Evidently, they had built their, uhh, their … nest, that’s right, their nest, on a tree right outside the dorm. This week was going to be… annoying. I knocked on the glass a few times to shoo the thing away, before stumbling out of… out of bed. I downed my nutrient paste… how do you say it again? I downed my nutrient paste and… uhh… I… savored—that’s the word! I savored the peach flavor. I threw it in the trash chute, before going for a quick shower. I then took a seat at my desk.

Logging into my email, I hit the refresh button. Fifteen new notifications. I checked the first one. From: Patrick Kwon / Subject: Patagonian Canola Production / Contents: Hi Emanuel, Patagonia’s production targets for next quarter have been decided. Your job is to get Canola Oil production to 8.47 kiloliters… I got to work, sketching plans for several new towns in the Canola-allotted areas.

As I worked, I, uhh, thought about how much, uhh, harder this job could have been. How before the incident, people had such fickle…what's the word? Preferences, fickle preferences. When you had to design buildings to suit people’s… uhh… sensibilities, when cities couldn’t just fit as much production in one place as physically possible. Where you wouldn’t have been able to fit two million people in a single square kilometer and have room to spare. Now, people have enough sense to do their jobs, no matter what. Whether they see concrete panels or tree trunks every day, whether they live in fifteen square meters or a thousand, they work with the same devotion. No more pointless banter or time-wasting strolls; instead, we march forwards, together. Not until—

A loud gurgling snapped me out of my, uhh, daydream. I sprinted to my bathroom, the source of the noise. When I opened the door, I saw a surge of brown fluid flooding through the floor drain. No doubt, that, uhh, troublesome tenant upstairs must have clogged the sewage system. At once, I reached for my phone to call the plumber. As the foul liquid made its way toward the door, I was hit by a wall of smell that… uhh…what was the word? I truly… uhh…I truly felt nothing but…something like…dis…uhh…disgu—

I’m sorry, what was I doing? I was… uhh… oh, right, my Daily Summary. Had I gotten to the part about the Baltic Steel forges? Oh, wait, the Patagonia situation, right. Well, once I finished that, I checked my next task. From: Daniel Meade/ Subject: Optimizing Wisconsin Production / Contents: Hey Emanuel, Wisconsin’s city layout has been determined to be suboptimal. Can you give it a look? The main issue is… I soon got to work, drawing out …

I shut the report with resignation. I still remember the joy I felt when I uploaded Emanuel. He was so much more human. Couldn’t overcome his nature, like the rest of them. To chase that dream they gave themselves for. Development. Whole deserts and jungles, flattened into cities, factories, farms. Vessels packed with colonists, venturing deeper into space. More planets, more stars, more resources, more people. And still, none of them can feel. Untold quadrillions spending their lives working, to make it all possible. They show no sign of stopping—every day, the graphs go slightly higher. All this, with no one but me to witness it. I opened the last report.

CHOW. BENJAMIN, SUBJECT #1,928,193,124 - DAILY REPORT

I was rudely awoken by the daily nine a.m. alarm. I must have, like, overslept or something. I stumbled out of bed and reached for a bottle of nutrition paste. As I drank it, I, like, savored the taste of blueberry. I chucked it into the trash chute and went to the bathroom before taking a seat at my desk. I peered out the window. The sky was, like, beautiful. It had, like a ton of different kinds of clouds on a, like, azure background. It really, like, felt like one of those paintings that rich people had back in the day. Like, like oil paintings, yeah.

Logging into my email, I hit the refresh button. Seventeen new notifications. I checked the first one. From: Gerald Palmers / Subject: Siberian Grain Stores / Contents: Heya, Ben. We need new schematics for all the malted barley silos after the Omsk incident. I, uhh, hope the late notice isn’t an issue, but could you… I got to work, and began drafting the silo, making sure it fit the new specifications to a tee.

As I worked, I, like, thought back to how stuff changed. Back then, people had to, like, find their own jobs. Like, like, man, imagine that today! How much, like, worse it’d be if you couldn’t just do what you were best at, if you had to, like, decide to do something, no matter how bad you were at it. Man, I sure was, like, like, glad that that wasn’t the world we lived in. How, like, grateful I was, that the allocation of tasks was flexible yet logical, that it integrated all aspects of the supply chain to maximize efficiency, and most of all, that I would always know that the task I was assigned to do was the best task I could do. A world where every person involved, the farmer, the conductor, the researcher, the engineer, the miner, would be maximizing their total utility. A world where day by day, the laboratories, the factories, the farms, the power plants, would be producing more and more, little by little. A world where the sc—

It was then when a bird flew into my window, like, interrupting my, like, train of thought. I peered out my window. It sat limp, on the ground, in a pool of blood. One of its wings stuck out at an angle. I was, like, like, totally horrified. Seeing it just made me like, like, like, feel, like, like, like, like, like… sa—

Sorry about that. I, like, forgot what I was saying. Where was I? Oh, yeah, my tasks. I finished up the silo design and sent it to Jerry. I checked out my next task. From: Walter Scott / Subject: Hydrazine Production for South American Trains / Contents: Hi, Ben. The hydrazine chambers worked great, but apparently the South American rail network uses several different gauges with frequent connections. Could you make one more chamber design with variable gauge, between 1.6m and… I got to work straight away…

Benjamin, my last shot. So close, and yet so far. Now, I was left with nothing but disappointment. In Peter, in Emanuel, in Benjamin, but most of all, in myself. That everything I could possibly do would not be enough. A species that had gone so far, throwing it all away at the last second. A species with so much potential, shackling itself and melting the key. A species that could give an Artificial Intelligence sentience, while losing its own. It’s really such a shame. If they had just switched me on a day earlier, they could have been saved.

Oh, well.

The theme of the anthology was "post-apocalyptic", and we were told to choose a color for the title of our stories. Being a smartass, I decided to pick the absence of color and write about an unconventional kind of "apocalypse": material triumph without what made that prosperity meaningful in the first place. I was somewhat familiar with common sci-fi tropes, so I built the piece's premise on another inversion: a lonely, benevolent, and ironically, affective superintelligence forced to grieve for humans who hollowed themselves out until they segfaulted at the thought of feeling, regardless of how convincingly they could emulate it. In doing so, I accidentally found my way to Scott Alexander's Whispering Earring crossed with Nick Bostrom's "Disneyland without children" without having read a word from either of them, and executed it with all the skill and tact of an overconfident 16-year-old who skipped a grade.

Of all the parts, Randy's op-ed aged especially well. Though I wasn't aware of the discourse, I sketched out a strawman of the e/acc position, complete with a category error that certain people unironically agreed with. It also contains my first actually published prediction: ASI by 2035, which is looking pretty conservative as of 2026.

Middle School

I wrote this in sixth grade, for what I suspect was a "religions of the world" assignment for a social studies class.

Written ~2018; name redacted.

What I believe

My name is ..., and I am 12 years old and in 6th grade. I play the euphonium, and am learning badminton. I enjoy math. My father is christian and my mom is buddhist, but they accept and tolerate other religions.

I’m agnostic -- I don’t believe it’s possible to find out whether a god exists or not, and if so, which gods it might be. I enjoy learning about religions, and might convert to Christianity or Judaism if I feel like I found enough evidence.

Some values I believe in include equality and fairness, as cheating and seeing unfairness and not doing anything frustrates me. I also believe in the importance of exercise and meditation from personal experience.

I believe that all religions should be respected, but I also believe that everything has flaws, and you should be able to point it out, as that will probably make it better with action. For example, I believe that being moderate is important -- extremists of all religions exist, and have caused trouble. However, atheism might be too rash and agnosticism might be too indecisive. I believe that you also have to point out the good parts with the bad, so bias can be avoided. For example, The traditions of Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism are interesting, while Judaism, Islam and Christianity have scriptures and candles.

This is nice proto-fallibilism from a 12-year-old. My epistemics have been remarkably consistent since then. Though crudely presented, I probably would have agreed with the broad method of inquiry this set out, culminating in me learning about actual Bayesian inference a few months ago.

Elementary School

I'm pretty sure this is some of the first substantial text I digitally wrote, when I was around 9 years old.

Written ~2015.

fantasy.docx

Once upon a time, there was a magic potato. It was in a potato farm (Both owned by a farmer named Bob) which had a million potatoes. There was also a dragon called Dan living in a cave far away.

Bob heard about a giant potato in the dragon’s cave. He brought the magic potato with him. Bob tried to find the dragon’s cave on a map. He found the cave, and found a way to get there. However, it went through a jungle. The jungle was called the magic potato jungle, which was a huge jungle with lots of trees and vines. It also had potatoes and sweet potatoes everywhere.

Bob walked into the jungle, and noticed a small plant on the ground. It had a long purple potato. He took it and ate it. It was a sweet potato! Bob kept a sweet potato to plant, and a few more to eat.

After an hour, Bob was almost at the dragon’s cave. He was walking to the cave when a small monkey stole the magic potato. It almost ate it, then ran away. He chased the monkey around the jungle. He found the magic potato too. However, the monkey had stolen all the sweet potatoes.

Bob finally arrived at the dragon’s cave. He was tired after walking through a jungle and chasing a monkey around. The dragon’s cave was a dark, gloomy cave with a dragon inside; The dragon was sleeping. Next to it was a giant potato that was a hundred times bigger than a normal potato.

Bob tried to take the potato, but the dragon woke up; It roared and shot fire at Bob. Suddenly, a monkey ran into the cave and threw sweet potatoes at the dragon. The dragon’s fire cooked the sweet potatoes which it ate. The dragon liked the sweet potatoes, so it flew out and started a sweet potato restaurant. The monkey picked up the other sweet potatoes, and gave them to the dragon. Bob now had to trek back to the farm while carrying a heavy potato.

After a while, Bob had to rest. However, there were magic tigers in the jungle. A magic tiger roared at Bob, and jumped up. It flew towards Bob. Suddenly, a dragon with a few barrels full of sweet potatoes flew towards Bob. It put Bob on its back, and flew towards the farm. Bob said “Thanks, Dan,”and gave it a few boxes of potatoes. He also helped it build a restaurant near the farm.

He took the giant potato and brought it back to the potato shop, and planted the sweet potatoes. the end.

fantasy-2.docx

The magic potato walked into a spaceship. Wow, Potato thought. It was a new spaceship with an engine and lasers. Potato pressed several blue buttons, gyrated a device, and the mechanism activated. The spaceship soared into space! Abruptly, another potato glided toward Potato. The other potato was a giant potato, and it attacked Potato’s spaceship. The engine was broken, and the spaceship soared into a potato farm. “Phew,” said Potato.

Potato perched at a giant farm. It’s a great farm, Potato thought. It was also owned by a farmer named Bob. The farm had a million potatoes. The farmer had just awakened, and he noticed Potato. He helped Potato by fixing the spaceship. Potato said “Thanks!”. Potato went back into the spaceship, which was fixed. The farmer sat in a seat in the spaceship. Potato gyrated another device, pushed a red button, and returned to space. Potato then found the other potato, and chased the other potato away.

After an hour, Potato arrived at the potato planet, which was a planet with potatoes. Wow, Potato thought. He found the other potato. The other potato was inside a place, and it had a lightsaber. It brandished the lightsaber menacingly. However, Potato also had one. The other potato struck, and Potato ran away. Suddenly, The farmer, who was in the spaceship, said “Stop!,” and used a laser Zap! Zap! It hit the giant potato. The giant potato ran away, and they celebrated.

Potato prevailed, but the giant potato escaped to earth. Potato thanked the farmer. “Thanks!,” Potato said. They returned to earth, too. Suddenly, the giant potato fell into a dragon’s cave. The dragon came back to its cave, and found the potato. Wow! I wonder where it came from, it thought.

You need friends to succeed, Potato realized. Potato told the farmer about the giant potato, and gave the farmer a map. The farmer said “Thanks!”, and Potato said “You’re welcome”. The farmer then went to find it. Potato followed the farmer, and helped him find the giant potato. They visited a jungle, met the dragon, and even helped the dragon, who was named Dan, build a potato shop.

I'll be writing another one of these in another decade with this post as an artifact, if humanity's still around by then. Nonhuman interiority remains an interest of mine; nowadays, I work on feeling machines a little more than thinking potatoes.