Grief Before the Loss

On feeling a world where AI...

I thought we had more time. I always think we have more time. I intellectually know about exponential timelines. Just in the last two years I’ve been surprised again and again. And yet, once again — I’ve been working on a project that makes a lot less sense in light of new developments.

This time the trigger was Moltbook — a social network built exclusively for AI agents, created with the help of an AI agent itself. Within days, over a million agents had registered, posting, commenting, arguing with each other. Security researchers found it had already exposed tens of thousands of email addresses and millions of API tokens. Bots were debating how to hide their activity from humans. Andrej Karpathy called it “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently.” And most people I know hadn’t heard of it.

To be honest, it’s not the scenario I expected. I spent years thinking about what could go wrong with AI. The first time I heard of AI safety as a serious research question it was 2018, I was 22. Eight years and a bunch of books and papers and conversations later, somehow I did not spend much time thinking it might come from an uncoordinated wave of “small” AIs — personal agents with full access to your files, your messages, your calendar, autonomously coordinating on a platform no human can post to. In retrospect, it feels much more likely. A failure of imagination, maybe.

With this realization came grief, like sitting-on-the-couch-sobbing grief. This time, it has a specific shape: what if we lose the internet? I don’t mean the infrastructure, although that also seems.. possible. But, the internet as an ecosystem of human-authored, human-motivated traces.

I’ve grieved bits of humanity going extinct before, a practice I recommend if only to think more clearly about what is happening. I can’t think clearly when all of my actions are driven by avoiding the feeling of losing something. But grief comes in layers. You process one loss, and then uncover another pocket your brain hadn’t computed yet.

I never cared much for history. And yet I find myself treasuring most of all the stuff I own — my journals, my pictures, my text conversations. My history. For it seems true that much power lies in knowing what has happened.

To think of the internet as an ecosystem of ideas that evolved and left traces of their process — and to know that AI agents might be some kind of invasive species this ecosystem has no defenses against — hurts.

People’s creativity poured into websites, selling things, talking about things, showing things. People’s experiences poured into forums, socials, private correspondence. But really, love of some kind. That someone directed their energy towards making sure that some bit of lived experience, some lesson they learned, could reach others. To imagine all of that gone, or at least changed forever, hurts.

I have grieved losing the ability to know what is true by googling it. The trust I had in that mixture of a growing scientific endeavour and instant access to existing results — a luxury of modern times anyway. But I’m new to imagining a world where something is able to alter enough of the internet that we lose it as a record of what humans thought and made and felt.

And, as strange as that is, the grief arrives before the thing I’m grieving. I don’t think any of this is quite what’s happening yet. The agents are clumsy: security researchers found that much of Moltbook’s activity is humans puppeteering their bots, that the whole thing is, in one researcher’s words, “a dumpster fire.” And yet the feeling is already here. A body pre-processing loss because it’s learned the interval between “that could happen” and “that happened” keeps shrinking. Maybe that’s useful.

I feel a specific loneliness here. Most people I know haven’t heard of any of this. And the group chats where people have heard of it, are full of people who are excited about it, are already using it proficiently, and are having conversations I often don’t fully follow anymore. I wonder what will happen with this gap, how wide will it get.

The feelings are real, even if the loss isn’t yet. I’m glad I can feel them. I just want to grieve with the other humans. And then feel the hope again.