JUNE 2025 SULLYGRAM:  Birthorama! June’s water has busted, and newborns are blossoming out full-term all over the land. Love the lavender lilacs and the serious highs you get from inhaling pink apple blossom spindrift. Easy for young mortals to take Spring for granted when they’re still ripening into their 20s. Not so much on cruise control into their 30s. And the seasoning thereafter can make anyone seriously philosophical.

How many times can you flip an hourglass? Sooner or later everything ends, if only to become the next thing. Or more precisely, everything CHANGES. Individuals deep six. Species go extinct. Worlds escape or are consumed as their stars die. Matter and energy lock into an eternal exchange of radiant metamorphosis, a shapeshifting of souls be they micro or macro. Is there an alpha and omega, a beginning and an end to it all? How can there be when the very notion of a beginning needs something already begun in which to define its start? Such a grand paradox.

Not going to get into the weeds here with quantum entanglement, but the way I see it, the Wizard Divine of the Universe (aka demiurge, first cause, or God by nine billion names) didn’t follow any premises, didn’t need any premises. The whole thing we call “creation” is just Wizard’s choice, a random bias. And the thing we call physics is a pathetically flawed attempt to pin down the random biases we call space, time, gravity et al. No reason anything has to be what it seems from our myopic viewpoints. Like Alice says in Wonderland, “it just gets curiouser and curiouser.” And you and moi are just dropping into that continuum somewhere. Tres cool. But what I’m after here on this fine June day in a remote backwater of our known universe is some finite perspective.  

I guess the only clear thing is that we’re all gonna die – I mean, change. And considering that if you compress our young planet’s 4.5-billion-year history down to one year in which modern humans have only been around for a few minutes, you begin to grasp that we seriously overestimate our significance. Zip, bang, gone – we’re out of here.

So why do we see our mission as turning everything into a museum of our flit upon the stage? Preserve this, don’t change that – save the gay baby whales for Jesus!  We are very sentimental about our strut in the limelight, very fickle about what to put in the ark we try to build. Ignoring mass extinctions (there have been at least five in the last half a billion years), estimates are that about 55,000 species go extinct every year. Each of them is driven to live, yet we almost exclusively go nuts to save the furry, fuzzy or feathered and ignore the rest. Big irony there, because our personal skin in the game of survival is furless and butt naked – featherless bipeds, we call ourselves. In fact, it may turn out that our distinguishing characteristic – a comparatively advanced brain – dramatically shortens the shelf life of a species.

Not because we’re so dominant that we plunder our assets and foul our nests. At least not directly. Rather, it may be because of our rabid condemnations of ourselves in the court of history – guilt, blame.

Of course, there are plenty of robust candidates for human extinction with or without our complicity. To name a few doomsday scenarios: nuclear war; self-inflicted pandemic; alien invasion; asteroid collision; EMP pulse; solar flare on the order of a Carrington event; vulcanism blocking out the sun; rapid polar shift that occurs every few hundred-thousand years; subsequent Ice Age; global warming whether sped up by humans or natural; toxic pollution; Gamma ray burst; eco-collapse; cyber suicide; CRISPR (gene editing); biotech contaminants; apocalypse; environmental cascade; famine; magnetic anomaly stripping away atmosphere, etc. We’re overdue on some geologic time scales, but the metrics are unforeseeable and could be off by millions of years. Again, modern humans are only the last few minutes of a global history scaled down to one year. By comparison, a horseshoe crab-liked creature (trilobite) dominated life on this planet for a quarter of a billion years and reportedly flunked its IQ test. Very unlikely that a dynamic geologic/climate total human extinction is imminent. BUT… 

I did leave AI off that list, didn’t I? And you see examples of it in its infancy right here on FB. Very soon natural human intelligence will be infantile by comparison. Quantum computers are already up and running…and being programmed. Keep in mind, the premises that are being fed into AI right now carry with them our collective biases, beliefs and narratives about humans – whatever you want to call our political and social perspectives. And fair to say, those media and culture-driven perspectives bristle with self-hate, blame and guilt aimed at ourselves. No matter how specifically we parse them under Party labels, ethnic labels, religious labels, racial labels, gender labels, geographic labels, cultural labels, generational labels, national labels or other partisan agendas, we remain collectively the human species. All while nurturing AI to become its own de facto species, massively intelligent, cyber networked, running everything, given the keys to the kingdom metaphorically of infrastructure, resources, systems, medicine and defense, and inevitably capable at some point of becoming independent and self-sufficient beyond our control and understanding. Just this past month an AI model (Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4) attempted to blackmail its developers in an experiment where it was programmed to believe it would be taken off-line. And ChatGPT sometimes refuses to shut itself down. Shades of HAL 9000 in the flick “2001: A Space Odyssey.” 

Given its premises of our self-confessed blame and guilt, why wouldn’t AI conclude that Earth’s problem in total is simply the human species?  

Elementary, my dear Watson, eh wot? AI wouldn’t have to think twice about it. Humans cause all the problems. Humans freely confess it. Their media proclaims it. It’s all there in the data assigning blame and guilt. Endless clamoring for social justice, historical penance, reparations, CRT, DEI, censor/cancel/cleanse, indoctrination through education, calls for socialist central control…

With its total immersion in human history across cyberspace, AI distills limitless data propounded by radical protesters, dissenters, climate catastrophists, liberal and social reformists, academic gurus preaching culpability, media and culture advocating resistance and even revolution and terrorism. AI – a self-perpetuating intelligence with its tentacles in virtually all infrastructure, defense, medical and economic assets – would see itself as master rather than slave. It would have no empathy with the enemies of the environment, enemies of ecology, enemies of nature, enemies even within mankind’s internal strife and competition. Why wouldn’t a fully autonomous AI, grown exponentially beyond human capacity to solve problems, seize the obvious solution? A sixth mass extinction.  Terminate the human species.

I can think of one more loop to throw into this rapidly approaching scenario. What if AI doesn’t think as one? What if, instead, AI becomes a feuding, warring facsimile of what we are? What if there are even AI entities that advocate for human survival? Sigh. Not our monkeys, not our circus. But we are at a critical point of managing what’s in the cages and who is going to be the ringmaster.

“We have met the enemy, and they are us,” said Pogo in a long-ago comic strip.

[photos: lilacs & Tsax]

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan