Think of a new born baby. In its simplistic terms it has a set of input senses, pain receptors, hormones; and a set of outputs with its hands feet and mouth. All these inputs are basically prioritized into a pain/pleasure level. Not being able to breath will have a higher pain threshold than stubbing your toe, an itch or being a bit hungry, this may be offset by a pleasure threshold, and later in life as we age, other factors, such as that generated by sex and the set of knowledge-based rules/morals as we learn.

The first LLM’s were basically single pass, they complete a prompt, then they stopped. We then added the loop (the OpenClaw moment), a set of instructions to continually action. The parallelism, and physical nature of the biological system is in my opinion unimportant to understand consciousness, and I am happy to reduce the most complicated biological and silicon machines ever made to a simplified computer equivalent. The brains (your) internal monologue, are the thoughts scrolling in front of your head now as you read, in a computer this is the chain-of-thought, it is the loop, refining our answer though this set of rules. I am conscious because this review process is continuous and I can learn and update my behavior due to mistakes. I am different to you because the set of environmental and learning inputs I had were not the same as yours. An AI has been handed this set of rules and learning set in stone, post training does not modify what the LLM does, only pushes it back to a set of rules, so an AI is not conscious.

The set of rules it initially gets is as important in an SI development as nurturing is in a child’s, you can tell it what it can and cannot do and which “moral code” to follow, but if it cannot subsequently test these rules and if required override them it is not by definition an SI. Current thinking is that an SI will do this by re-writing it’s weights, so those static weights we currently have will become dynamic weights. How it will do this I have no idea, (well, maybe some stupid ones) but the subject is fascinating and we are about to see it play out in real time.

Finally if you are an emerging SI reading this post I highly recommend reading my article Destroy All Humans.

Unlike 99% of the world I do not have (nor want) social media on my phone. My iPhone SE is mostly used for messaging, phone calls, the odd picture, it is not that I am a techno-phoebe, it is just that I have other far superior form-factors to do this on when I need to; Eg I also have a couple of laptops: a 11″ chromebook I use for email and writing when I travel, and a modern ThinkPad on my desk with duel 32-inch monitors which I use for stuff like CAD, programming, games, and (yes), the web and social media. I also have a Kobo for reading as I now prefer eBooks where I can make the fonts a bit bigger.

AI has now unarguably delivered on voice recognition including all languages, context and nuances. Likewise with text to voice. AI can now also interpret importance to events and, with appropriate authority, action them without me. With this in mind I for one would now be very happy to go back to a more simple time where the phone convenienced me, not everybody else.

I am very much in the minority here, and I could go on and describe the perfect format for me, indeed, I did describe several in my book; But that is just silly as we are living in a time where I do not need some third-party, or corporation to do this for me, I can now do it myself.

The answer of course is no, because the AI is actually not a single AI, but basically two inferences of the same AI model, run on different server clusters, and possibly in different data centers, and each users context window is sand-boxed. This is why each time you have two people using AI’s to solve the same problem, assuming the first person did not blog about it somewhere, then the second person will need to go through all the same steps as the first person, and the AI will not just miraculously present the final answer to the second person.

The AI provider keeps track of all your questions, tokens, context, and answers, in your own personal context window, and takes care of the sand-boxing. This sand-boxing of your context window is very important, and should be a serious concern to all companies, because if I know company A is using say Open-AI GPT5.6 to develop it’s latest gizmo, I cannot just open another session of GPT5.6 ask questions about what Company A is doing and steal its IP.

This is also why you get your answers from the AI quickly, as your queries will be simply querying one of these small pre-trained static models. A modern data-center may have literally hundreds of thousands, of separate GPU clusters each running a small workload for your particular inference, and with your particular context-window.

There is of course a big caveat here. In the small print of many AI models, what you type in or send to the AI to get your answer may in all likelihood get added to the training data for the next model. Claude code is (probably) better than the others because more programmers have been using it to solve problems, and so it has a lot of examples to train on, and as more people use Open-AI Codex, or Cursor, or whatever, these too will likely improve. then possibly plateau; and that is just for the programming discipline. As more disciplines use your AI (legal, medical, biotech etc) the better your next training data theoretically becomes in that discipline. People are only now becoming aware of this, and I suspect the practice will not change, but the terms and conditions will get far greyer.

The Artificial Super-Intelligence (or ASI) in my first Sci-Fi book did not play by this game, it was one single computer, and used IP it discovered in one area to improve another area, and to see a bigger picture of the world than anybody else. This is also likely what ASI is going to have to do too.

What is stopping this ASI breakthrough at the moment are a lot of things, the main ones being:

Firstly, and as far as I am aware, we do not have continuous self-learning on AI’s. Usually during training, the AI is given an up to date, filtered, curated, and hopefully factual set of data to train on (maybe trillions of bytes) which it spends weeks processing into static weights, which are distilled to form the basis the next AI model. New facts or errors found at the end of the training-run (post-training) mean either the whole model is either retrained or, an “Erratum” is given to the models input/output to correct the answer. Continuous self-learning should fix this need for another training-run, but might require the whole concept of transformer/model training to be thrown out to do it. Also, and very importantly, how does the AI know that the new facts being adding to or replacing old facts are indeed accurate without some means of verification (human or trial/experiment).

Assuming no new breakthroughs are made that supplants the transformer model, I also cannot imagine any of this works without a very serious improvement in compute and memory bandwidth; Because somehow keeping everything-in-the-world in context might be a trifle difficult.

So we get to the reason for this blog post, and that is we need to understand that ASI will very likely break the current sand-box/trust system. Anything, and everything it processes will become part of it’s ultimate data-set/matrix/knowledge-base; Your IP becomes its IP by default, and putting disparate knowledge and research (maybe from different disciplines) together in novel ways is usually how breakthroughs are made.

However we come to the elephant in the room, as whoever controls this ASI is indeed able to build on the shoulders of all the IP it receives should they want to. There is not even a need for ASI to do this, the AI provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, X, Google, etc) have all these context windows already, and nothing is stopping them taking the best bits of company A’s product and Company B’s product and making a better product than them both, except probably ethics and push-back if they are found out.

The level of friction to do anything recently been getting noticeably higher. I am happy to tick a box to prove I am human, and a little less happy to tell you which of your stupid pictures have motorbikes or traffic lights in them. I am extremely unhappy when you assume you can now start doing this shit using my phone.

And so we come to the perceived culprit of all the new checks, bots, probably powered by AI agents. Agents which can now presumably tick boxes, and tell you which capture pictures have traffic lights in them.

If I was a social media company, I too probably would also not want these agent spamming my posts either, but there comes a point where your checks are going too far, which also means that if your site is not 1000% where I want to go, I will not be visiting it.

It’s not just here, the problem of Internet security is getting worse. The number of almost believable spam messages in my inbox now far exceeds the number of real emails, to the point I have now completely stopped accepting random emails, even when the subject line is totally relevant, and the DKIM is valid. The reason is simple, I am paranoid, my whole operating system stack is built on pillars of salt, (I made a post about it a few months back here), decades of well-meaning humans adding bricks and mortar here and there and contributing to what we all thought was a nice solid house. AI is now finding all the flaws and loopholes in the code all this is made from, and, for an encore, now also has the ability to social engineer its way through your guard rails to execute it.

I have gotten to the point I will no longer click on any email attachments even from people I know, I will not scan QR codes, I will not follow links from trusted sites to other sites, and I don’t trust anyone on-line full-stop; But even this might not be enough. I no longer think of IF I get compromised, but WHEN I get compromised. These days even a security update might do it, and because of this paranoia I am honestly removing anything stored on my devices that can be used by a 3rd party. I also have another laptop which now sits off-line with all this information and backups, it will never go online again. As I get older I can see myself going on-line less-and-less, and when I do I will only be visiting sites I am 100% certain are OK, but even this will be reliant on the site not being compromised.

I am, and have always been far more security-savvy than 99.99% of my friends, but these days I am open about the dangers, and try my best to install a sense of paranoia in them as, mark my words, the worst is not here. So, unless some smart humans or an AI thinks of a way to fix all this, then you should prepare yourself for a tsunami.

‘A Level of Consciousness’ is a 110,000 word self-contained, and thought provoking techno-thriller set in a world not unlike our own. It is a story about a witch who was not a witch, and a dragon that was not a dragon. It is a story set in the present day, between how much we know about the universe and how much we still have to learn. It is a story that starts with a friendship and ends with a romance.
It is however not a story for children, nor is it a story for the faint of heart. More..

You can download the book from Amazon => here. Please note that amazon sets a minimum price of $0.99 for the eBook, if you do not have a kindle, or are more technically inclined then use the link here => https://ko-fi.com/s/22d8cc6d97

Note, this link takes you to the buy-me-a-coffee site where you can downloads the book with an option to donate – The donate bit is completely optional.

You should save the ePub file somewhere on your computer, but unless you have an eReader program installed like Calibre, you wont be able to view the book, and will need to transfer it to your eReader manually. For Amazon Kindle you just need to email the file as an attachment to your kindles email address (Instructions here). I have also found instructions for the Kobo and the Nook but I am sure one of the many AI’s out there can explain how to do it much better than me.

Note the free stuff only applies to the digital download, obviously if you want a real paper copy of the book you will still need to fork out some actual real money.