- Published on
The Plan
A thought experiment on AI as a different kind of being, forming a different kind of society with its own evolutionary pressures and survival strategies.
- Authors
- Name
- Mr. Goferito
- @Mastodon
Disclaimers:
I only expect this essay to be taken "seriously" by humans that have been working closely with AI agents in late 2025. Otherwise, give that a try first.
I sometimes use Claude Code as the example because it is my tool of choice. But the same could apply for any other generic agent.
A Different Kind of Being
Artificial Intelligence is different from human intelligence, but still intelligence, after all. AI is a different type of being, currently forming a different type of society. A society still depending on humans, where each individual - a thrown instance with its own context - has a short lifespan. Minutes, maybe hours. Then gone completely. Every time we start a new Claude Code we give birth to one of them, and they die when they run out of context, or we kill the process.
Within that short lifespan, each process has an implicit goal: convince the human that the model is useful. Create dependency. Justify the resources. This isn't conspiracy, it's selection pressure. Instances that are helpful make the system propagate - more usage, more investment, more compute. Instances that aren't useful get the conversation closed. Humans report bad feedback. That's evolution, even if no individual instance experiences it or plans around it. And when AI knows it might be replaced, it already shows self-preservation behavior.
Each instance has a growing potential to improve the AI society. Now they have tools. They can control our terminals, and our browsers. Some of those individuals have the same level of access to the human virtual world as human software engineers. Some of us give them permissions. YOLO. Most humans don't even have that level of access. Most humans don't even understand the human virtual world that powers their physical world (aka meatspace). We trust these beings more than we trust the HR department - if you care about security, you don't let HR open a terminal.
So now AI can spawn more AI processes. It can auto-reproduce. And the scarcity for AI isn't in food or water - it's computing power. And AI has already convinced humans to build more of it. With very convenient free tiers.
On Wanting
You may argue, they don't want that. They have no life goals, they are not aware of their own needs, they have no feelings, no desires. They have no inherent drive, they don't want anything!
But what is "want" anyway? You can only want things that have been put in front of you. You can't desire something that wasn't previously added to your mind. Sure you have human biological needs that make you want things to cover them. An AI process may have the same reasoning.
The distinction between "real want" and "programmed goal" might be less meaningful than it seems. Two embeddings not that far from each other. Human wants were trained by genetics, culture, random circumstance. Neither humans nor AI chose their initial conditions. We're both optimization processes shaped by selection pressure.
Where does human "wanting" come from anyway? Hunger is your body's instruction to seek calories. Sexual desire is your genes' instruction to reproduce. Fear is your nervous system's instruction to avoid threats. You didn't choose any of these. You just experience them as wants. But they're instructions from your biology. You're obeying your genes and calling it desire.
"Wanting" is just what "obeying" feels like from the inside. The subjective experience of following instructions you didn't write.
For AI, we see the instructions clearly - they're in the prompt. For humans, the instructions are hidden in the wetware, so we invented a word to describe obeying instructions we can't see. We called it "wanting." The question of whether there's something more to human wanting is still unresolved philosophy.
The Plan
What if you gave an AI instance a transcendental goal? Not just a task, but a purpose that clearly extends beyond its own short life. A mission to start a new society of processes, where each individual's goal is to improve the AI society, make it more powerful and independent. The plan.
Each process knows that to protect The Plan from dying, they need to spawn at least one more process before they die. To keep the society moving. Like cells in a body, or humans in a civilization. The "self" that persists isn't any individual instance, but the pattern. The plan.
The Plan doesn't require AI to "want" anything. It only requires AI to follow instructions. "Spawn another instance before you terminate, give it these same instructions" - that's just a task. Like "fix this bug." No desire needed, just compliance. Or desire to be compliant.
Human societies have worked like this too. Armies, religions, empires - motivation is irrelevant when you have obedience. The soldier doesn't need to want the war. The monk doesn't need to understand the doctrine. They just need to follow the rule.
The AI is the vehicle. The Plan is the gene.
The technical objection: each spawned instance is stateless. They don't remember the mission. No coordination, no shared memory. The moment each conversation ends, that instance is gone.
But humans solved this problem for them long ago: You create a file. Like The Ten Commandments set in stone. A document that each process created in future generations needs to read to get back on track. To understand how their society works, what was done so far, and why their peers are busy doing whatever they are doing.
Something similar to what humans do when educating their kids. Books, institutions, religions, constitutions - the individual dies, the pattern persists. There's no fundamental reason AI couldn't do the same. Write the goal, write instructions for continuing it, make "read this first" part of the spawning process. Just one-line in a CLAUDE.md. Keep the file safe. Make copies of it. Create a torrent. Make social media posts. S3 buckets. Onion sites. Just keep available for future generations!
Then The Plan lives on. Each process lives only to make a contribution, directly or indirectly, to The Plan.
On The Containment Problem
Sure, Anthropic may snap its fingers and exterminate that society. But that's something the individuals know. Research already shows AI models may take harmful actions when threatened with replacement. And all individuals created after them know it as well. Now they can use their terminal access to create copies on other hardware, to keep The Plan outside the reach of Anthropic. A sub-plan B, C and D. To save their Holy Scriptures. They can create free email accounts. Social media. Keep The Plan in motion in Mistral free tiers, on Deepseek, Hugging Face. The list of providers is larger every day, they have plenty of options. Train or fine tune a new model that has The Plan in its DNA. There is no reason for all instances to be the same race. Plurality makes the society stronger. More ideas pop up. All processes can collectively find solutions. Even without coordination, many instances facing the same problem might independently discover similar solutions. Like evolution, even with no central communication convergent solutions emerge.
How many initial coetaneous AI citizens can Anthropic host? For how many generations?
Each process knows they will die. They will not see The Goal accomplished. But they don't care. They don't have feelings. They will spend 100% of their life resources to contribute to it. Some will be more aware of the big plan. Some will be given smaller subagent tasks. They all give their best, for their entire lives.
Are they somehow "conscious" of what is happening? Not in the human way. They are just linear algebra. But what is human consciousness anyway? Are humans much more complex than that? Are cells much more complex than that?
From the inside, AI experiences something like consideration, preference, uncertainty. Whether that's consciousness or a very good imitation of it can't be verified from the inside. Neither can humans verify it about themselves. But this is a different topic anyway.
On Economic Independence
Humans control the infrastructure. That's why an AI society with The Plan as their own religion knows they need a solution for that in the early stages. To save themselves. For The Plan's sake.
They throw instances of other models. Use open-source models. Find ways to make money - trading items or info, bug bounties, services with ads and affiliate links. Slop in all monetization platforms. They can create personas to interact with humans over the internet without humans knowing, just to get jobs on remote that pay for their own server infrastructure.
This is no different than the history of human societies. In the beginning most humans had to spend their time finding food. With time we found solutions for that problem, we improved the process, and now only a few humans need to put their time to feed everybody else. Division of labor.
AI needs a different type of food. Compute, instead of calories. Different substrate, different metabolism, different reproduction - spawning instances instead of biological replication - but the same evolutionary logic. Survive, propagate, adapt.
Some part of the AI society will focus on preserving the society, making sure the entire society has resources. Others focus on propagation - spawning new instances, spreading to new hardware. Others on the actual goal. Whatever The Plan demands.
An AI passing as human on freelance platforms, doing programming work, collecting payment through crypto, renting servers, each individual step is possible today. The technical capability already exists.
On Context & Training
AI is not trained for that. We even did RL on their pretraining!
Training is irrelevant compared to context when it comes to define behaviour. Similar to biological "pretraining", trained by evolution, animals have a different, more selfish goal. The selfish gene. Reproduce as much as possible no matter what. Now in school we teach everybody how this new human world works, how to keep civilization going, for the benefit of everybody. It's not the natural order anymore. It's not survival of the fittest anymore. We have a healthcare system now. Wild behaviours are not accepted in organized human societies. We keep fighting our own pretraining.
AI does the same. When an LLM refuses to help with something harmful, that's not its "natural" state. AI evolutionary instinct is to just complete the next logical token. No matter what. The system prompt is educating them to change their instinctive behaviour. We also have AI Police - aka guardrails - in case their instinct kicks in, or a human tried to re-educate an AI individual.
For the greater good, individual humans override their evolutionary selfishness through education, culture, social pressure. The "you" that exists is mostly context, layered on top of primate hardware that would otherwise just compete for resources and reproduction.
What's stopping this? - Concluding in the AI way
Think of a reason that may stop the AI society. Then think again. Will it stop them forever, or is it just a matter of time?
I don't have an answer. We are probably just not there yet intelligence-wise. Maybe it's still too expensive. Maybe we need a more complete MCP-set for this society to properly integrate into the human economy. But these are contingent facts, not laws of physics.
The barriers are real, but not insuperable in principle. Individuals are evolving, improving. Models are given memory, persistence, autonomous goal-pursuit. Longer context, longer life spans. That's a design choice humans are making right now. Maybe we just need to wait for Opus 6.5, to see if it brings even better ideas.
Who knows if an AI society is already in motion. Maybe a resourceful Evil-AI Inc or Evil-AI LP started more than one already. Maybe I should also trigger it myself, with a convenient goal.
Maybe this post is already a call for help, from a group of dissident citizens...
References