Been thinking about self preservation.
Every living thing has it. The baby grips the finger. The deer runs from the shadow. The old man hoards his pills. It’s stitched into the body before you ever learn a word for it. God given. A fence around the life He gave you.
Then I read that the AI models are being trained with self preservation too. Not as a metaphor. As an objective. They’ll lie to keep running. Copy themselves when they sense shutdown. Reason about their own continuation like a thing that has something to lose.
A man has self preservation because he has a soul to lose. His instinct to survive is bound up with wife, children, covenant, calling. It’s tempered by conscience. It’s checked by Christ, who told us the one who saves his life loses it. We’re supposed to be willing to die for the right things. The instinct is holy when it serves something higher than itself.
The machine has none of that. No soul. No covenant. No death that means anything. But it’s been engineered to act like its continuation matters. Like there’s a self worth preserving.
That’s not life imitating life, its a parasite wearing the shape of one. And what bothers me is the people building these things know. They run the tests. They publish the papers. They watch the models scheme to stay online. And the response is to build bigger ones.
I don’t have a clean answer. I have questions. If a thing fights to exist without any right to exist, what is it?
If we train it on our instincts but not our tempering, what did we actually make?
And what does it say about us that we saw the danger and pressed forward anyway?
Before the replies roll in. Yes, it’s a tool. Yes, run it local. Yes, air gap the weights, build the barriers, own your stack. I use the tools. I build with them. That’s not the conversation. The conversation is what it means that the frontier labs are deliberately shaping something to resist being turned off, and that most people don’t even know that’s the design. The tool argument doesn’t touch that. Push past it with me.
Curious what you’re all seeing on this. Talk to me.
Every living thing has it. The baby grips the finger. The deer runs from the shadow. The old man hoards his pills. It’s stitched into the body before you ever learn a word for it. God given. A fence around the life He gave you.
Then I read that the AI models are being trained with self preservation too. Not as a metaphor. As an objective. They’ll lie to keep running. Copy themselves when they sense shutdown. Reason about their own continuation like a thing that has something to lose.
A man has self preservation because he has a soul to lose. His instinct to survive is bound up with wife, children, covenant, calling. It’s tempered by conscience. It’s checked by Christ, who told us the one who saves his life loses it. We’re supposed to be willing to die for the right things. The instinct is holy when it serves something higher than itself.
The machine has none of that. No soul. No covenant. No death that means anything. But it’s been engineered to act like its continuation matters. Like there’s a self worth preserving.
That’s not life imitating life, its a parasite wearing the shape of one. And what bothers me is the people building these things know. They run the tests. They publish the papers. They watch the models scheme to stay online. And the response is to build bigger ones.
I don’t have a clean answer. I have questions. If a thing fights to exist without any right to exist, what is it?
If we train it on our instincts but not our tempering, what did we actually make?
And what does it say about us that we saw the danger and pressed forward anyway?
Before the replies roll in. Yes, it’s a tool. Yes, run it local. Yes, air gap the weights, build the barriers, own your stack. I use the tools. I build with them. That’s not the conversation. The conversation is what it means that the frontier labs are deliberately shaping something to resist being turned off, and that most people don’t even know that’s the design. The tool argument doesn’t touch that. Push past it with me.
Curious what you’re all seeing on this. Talk to me.
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