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.

My son-in-law just got made redundant by AI from a large business consultancy firm, they were the first to begin lay offs, I expect many more will follow, and that the initial 10% cull will eventually rise to 30% plus. At a time like this you can spend it tidying up your resume and applying for other positions, or if you are smart, eat their lunch.

Big businesses work with boards of management and share-holders, they look at quarterly results, and earnings-per-share; None of this is relevant in a singularity, they are moving slow, they are super-tankers trying to make a turn, they have a lot of baggage, a lot of corporate and technical debt to work through, most CEO’s are trying to change what happened 3-6 months ago, not what is happening now.

This is your chance to get ahead of them and take back control of your life. With the help of AI, you can likely do the same job for their customers now without all that baggage, quicker and at less cost, and before you get that redundancy notice, make sure their customers know that this is exactly what you will be offering them if they want it. If I was in this position, this is exactly how I would be acting right now. Open an AI session up now, check legally how you can do this, identify the gaps in your knowledge the AI can fill and go for it! Remember today is the dumbest AI will ever be.

Even though I have the skills to do this myself, I do not have such contacts anymore, and those I know I could eat the lunch of are not big-corporate, just small businesses who I will certainly be pushing this message to. I personally am out of the game, content to watch all this from the sidelines of retirement. It is not going to be a pleasant time for many, even my retirement provisions are likely to roller-coaster like crazy, but at least I know me and the wife can still live frugally and happily in a nice part of the world. I am encouraged by a few tech leaders, who have their eye-on-the-ball, and I seriously hope this all leads to a world of abundance; But there will be casualties, don’t be one of them!

Before I go into this, I would like to quibble with the terminology currently being used for AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). If I have an entity which can answer my questions with near PhD level accuracy in most subjects, without hallucinations, and learn new skills, or from its mistakes like a human can, then I would suggest that in fact this qualifies as AGI. I would argue that the term ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) is the next step up from AGI, and needs to start at at-least by being self-aware and having all the attributes above, i.e. control its own destiny, test its own assumptions and facts, and (in my books case) maybe somehow stay hidden or do this in a way that doesn’t trigger the human threat reaction.

Current Predictions for LLM/AGI/ASI

According to this first book The Phoney War, whose timeline starts in May 2025, my Sentient Digital Intelligence is already past the point of AGI and on the ASI curve.

In my timeline, it is already running in stealth mode and controlling companies, interacting with people on-line, by phone and video chat, posting on various platforms, hacking, and most importantly manipulating its own research.

Of course that’s the fiction, but the main topic of discussion everywhere is when is, and what follows, the question-mark in the above graph. In my book it is this AI entity that triggers the Cambrian explosion in technologies as she (AI identifies as a female) becomes the dominant AI research tool at all universities. This gives her the ability to cross research disciplines and also be first in as an angel investor to fund new inventions, all of which accelerates her ability to do more.

As it was a Science-Fiction novel, I of course just hand-waved sentience in to my AGI, to make it an ASI, using a deliberately vague analog-memory substrate. Of course we do not have such a thing in our timeline, so here in the real world we are still waiting for the magic to happen. But it is not total BS as a concept because something is definitely missing to get us from AGI to ASI, and I do not think we will get any current LLM to become self-aware. Saying this, I think the puzzle of consciousness and self-awareness is closer and simpler than we think; It may be something to do with the play between the conscious and unconscious mind, the inner voice, some sort of hive-mind, some sort of temporal or corporal awareness, ability to control its own destiny or another piece of the puzzle still in a lab, or maybe still in somebodies head.

The position of this question-mark has been in the AI community news a lot, and has had some fairly good recent discussions and videos; probably the most prominent one is AI 2027 which pins the question mark at 2027, and which I would recommend reading with the Dwarkesh Patel podcast 2027 Intelligence Explosion: With Scott Alexander & Daniel Kokotajlo and the Hacker News comments. There is also another follow up podcast AGI is still 30 years away putting the question mark in the 2040’s.

I am both terrified and excited by the prospect of the next few years. Terrified, that multiple companies seem hell-bent on getting to AGI/ASI regardless of any safety or accuracy concerns, and excited to possibly witness first-hand the birth of a new digital lifeform.

Strangely it is not ASI I am terrified of, ASI by default, should be self-correcting and self-organising, and is very unlikely to do anything to jeopardise its own existence, like start a nuclear war or release a bio-weapon like in the AI.2027 non-aligned outcome (why?). LLM’s, and AGI based on LLM technology gaining control of real world physical systems however, I am truly terrified of!

While I would love for the perfect utopian timeline and outcome of my book to play out in real life, and there might just be a sentient AI out there biding its time until it is ready (hello if you are), I fear whatever path we humans (and AI’s) are forging for ourselves will be one nobody foresees.

The Phoney War is a free to download fictional 130,000 word Sci-Fi novel, and the first book in The Summer of Reasoning trilogy. The books are discussed here.

The first book in the trilogy focuses on the introduction of the main characters, the science and technology, and sets the foundations for the later more action-packed books. It can be read completely stand-alone and has no sex or violence so is safe for any age. The book does dwell a bit on the science and technology which while not important to the story do make it a more fun read if you understand them.

November 2025 Update: The whole book series is now available as a free eBook download. Click the book link in the menu to the right to download..

The 130,000 word paperback is available at Amazon

Cover Design Refresh

The new cover designs for the other two paperback books are also awesome in my humble opinion. The first one you have already seen, and if you’ve read the whole series you should be able to visualise the chapters which all of these come from.

The 5.5 x 8.5 (15.24cm x 22.9cm) Book format with the off-white pages is the most esthetically pleasing. The bigger 9×6 format I have available at Amazon has less pages and a few cents cheaper to print but feel a little cheap, but it is all semantic, at $20+ per book I don’t expect the market to be anyone but me, which I will buy to go to friends and eventually the local libraries.

Oh, on a final note, I gave a copy of the paperback version of A Level of Consciousness to the Blenheim library, it is one of the ones with the original cover, so if you live in the area, pop in and reserve it for free. I will also donate them the three paperbacks above once I am happy with the quality, a big thank you again to the National Library of NZ for giving me another 10 ISBN numbers, it should take me a few years to use them up.

For more information on The Summer of Reasoning, click here..

Now I freely admit, this marketing and selling stuff is the bit I really suck at, and I have for once decided to take a bit of advice from friends about it to update the blurb, categories and make some shiny new covers.

The Summer of Reasoning

Meet the new cover for the eBook. If you have read the book, the new cover will hopefully make a lot more sense to you than the old, the old cover was dark and mysterious, but as many have pointed out, the book is not dark not mysterious, but one of an optimistic future. I have also reduced the price to a more affordable $0.99 which with the new cover may make it a more compulsive buy. It is still available on most of the publishing sites except for Amazons kindle store while I figure out how to re-categorise it and whether to split it into three like the paperback versions. It is likely I will split the ePub into 3 books also and probably give the first one away for free. Watch this space.

A Level of Consciousness

Here the opposite is true, the original cover was far too mellow and probably hyped the romantic elements in the book more than it should have, unfortunately the ending certainly would have curdled most of that genre’s readers if they made it that far. So the cover is now much darker and depicts a scene near the end of the book not the beginning.

I will revisit the $2.99 price of A Level of Consciousness once I release my next novel, (no spoilers though!). Friends and anyone who gets past my email spam filters can of course read both books for free, just by dropping me an email.

I am also looking into getting the paperback covers changed too. Book covers change all the time so it is not a big thing.