We Are Not Ready

16 Feb 2026 •

While America sleeps, the broligrachs are cozying up to Dear Leader with plans to make tech fascism impossible to un-install.

Imagine it's 2027. A new country appears overnight. 50 million citizens, every one smarter than any Nobel Prize winner who has ever lived. They think 10 to 100 times faster than any human. They never sleep. They can use the internet, control robots, direct experiments, and operate anything with a digital interface.

What would a national security advisor say?

... The answer is obvious: "the single most serious national security threat we've faced in a century, possibly ever."

We're building that country.

... The downside, if we get it wrong, is...

AI that behaves in ways its creators can't predict or control.

AI that lowers the barrier for creating biological weapons.

AI that enables authoritarian governments to build surveillance states that can never be dismantled.

The above is excerpted from "Something Big Is Happening," the viral essay by Matt Shumer that, as of mid-February, has racked up more than 83 million views on X.

The quote about AI representing "the single most serious national security threat we've faced in a century, possibly ever" comes from Anthropic's Dario Amodei, whom Shumer describes as "probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry."

Among Amodei's rivals — including the likes of Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI — the very notion of safety has been tossed out of the window in the name of acceleration at all costs.

All of Amodei's rivals are, of course, cozying up to Dear Leader and contracting with America's Christo-Fascists to build the kind of surveillance state that can never be un-installed.

In his essay, Shumer compares the current situation to February 2020, the moment before, "over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed."

Shumer (as I am prone to do in this newsletter*) emphasizes that this particular moment is more perilous precisely because, "the future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people."

And, Shumer tells us, this small group is very nervous:

The people building this technology are simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet. They believe it's too powerful to stop and too important to abandon. Whether that's wisdom or rationalization, I don't know.

To me, three things are clear:

We're not ready for what's to come.
The people building this technology are not qualified to decide the future of humanity.
At least one of them is alleged to be a heavy drug user who frequently displays extreme, erratic, and troubling behavior.

As I wrote last month, the broligarchs are the only ones who have gamed everything out. They already have their exit strategy in place in the event of "hard takeoff" in which AI makes the rest of us obsolete.

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*Further reading:

May 2024: Who Controls Your Future?