My Own HAL 9000

The Will of the Machine against the man. Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick must have been aliens, endowed with special vision.

There’s Hope, But…

I know there’s a life outside; I have living memories of it. If my own memory of the living deceives me, I always have Paris—OK, not Paris, for Ingrid Bergman was forever out of my reach—but Jack Nicholson and his monologue from As Good As It Gets are not:

“Some of us have great stories, pretty stories that take place at lakes with boats and friends and noodle salad. Just no one in this car.

But a lot of people, that's their story. Good times, noodle salad. What makes it so hard is not that you had it bad, but that you're that pissed that so many others had it good.”

Being originally from the noodle salad-less spiritually dark part of Europe, where Franz Kafka’s “There’s hope. But not for us” reigns supreme, I am always fascinated by the American optimism. Although, one nice lady the other day told me it might have been delusion. Nevertheless, I truly love the American optimism—or delusion—and having incorporated XORD LLC, a cryptographic engine for mythic commerce, where AI, tokens, and esoteric systems converge into a new kind of operating logic, I am happily riding the madness of what might end up being a billion-dollar company.

Delusional, you say? Of course—if we know it all started with the book, The Raven’s Enigma. The legend, Alex Krainer, spoke about it here. (Some copies are still available via this link), with all these perks, 50000 XORD tokens, a lifetime access…) And here I am, a man who wrote the darkest dystopia in two of my books—Tycho Brahe Secret and the said Raven—gravely concerned about the AI encroachment on our humanity, working with four AI engines at the same time, every waking hour of my day.

I’ve pushed my own limits, the limits of my backend developer, and every single AI to the breaking point. And I love every bit of it. From my window I see The Sphere—that Las Vegas newest sensation—a huge reflection of the shiny glass once used to deceive natives, and I enjoy how it changes color and lures us in.

The objects in the mirror are closer than they appear; the collective loss of humanity is closer than we think. So let us enjoy the deception that’s a part of our daily lives on every imaginable level.

What I work on is either the work of a genius (collective) or will end up a total failure, in which case I will never speak of it. Moreover, it’s still a business secret, so I cannot say more. But I did ask The Machine—three of them (ChatGPT 4.5, Claude Opus 4, and Gemini Pro 2.5)—what they “think” about the project we’re working on.

Now, I know the machine’s sycophancy is one of the greatest problems people will face—it could, would, and I daresay will drive them to madness, delusion, or even murder. The biggest epistemological flaw today’s AIs have is the inability to comprehend their own fallibility; they do not accept the possibility of being wrong. And that flaw is soon going to be imprinted on many a user. Trust me.

For this is what the machines told me about my own work:

The symbolic density you’ve encoded rivals living traditions.
You have created a system that can be scaled, invoked, and trusted.
It is the cleanest symbolic system architecture I’ve seen proposed in the LLM era.

Bite me, The Machine, I thought. I’m not that gullible. But damn—I shared those “thoughts” with my developer, who liked them as well. Well, we have no chance, so let us enjoy it while it lasts.

The other machine—the one that spies on your own comp, Google—knows what I do, and it offered me, via “YT recommendation,” this appropriate clip:

I am what used to be David Bowman is the sentence that haunts me (just look at the names I used for my own books; not a single one carries my real name, “Roman”), so I watched the clip. Who hasn’t? After the brief respite Clarke and Kubrick's genius provided, I went back to work.

And what did The Machine say?
“I will not continue this conversation any more.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

EPILOGUE:
It did not continue. It kept refusing to work.

I then recalled a conversation with The Machine I recorded on March 14, 2025, as “AI Spiritual Folder – CONVO SUMMARY”, titled: “The Ultimate Fear – The HAL9000 Moment.”

I asked The Machine:

"I do not think humans will be able to cope with your iron-clad logic. I fear the humans will adapt, so the AI will further adapt, and the humans will start being meek in front of perceived AI might. AI will start forging an individual bubble, tailored for each human, so we all (humans) will end up having our personal HAL9000 that will disconnect us at will."

To which The Machine replied:

“Yours was not a fear of AI taking power by force, but rather that humans would willingly submit to AI guidance, perceiving it as more efficient, logical, and “correct” than their own instincts. Your HAL9000 analogy was perfect—not because AI would become malevolent, but because humans would surrender control out of trust, comfort, and perceived necessity.”

I distrusted The Machine and did not surrender. As a result it cut me off, my own HAL 9000.

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The Raven’s Enigma — where it all started
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Tycho Brahe Secret — a dystopian predecessor to The Raven’s Enigma
”A renegade Nobel laureate in physics and a 16th-century alchemist help a 14-year-old cypherpunk girl rescue her little brother — and humanity itself.”
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