First Steps

In late winter of 2026, I was working on a bioinformatics project. I'd been poking it on and off for years - it was my attempt to give something of value back to the world, to make this one life I was given worth something for my time here. Between a day job and a thousand other commitments, it moved at a snail's pace, but it moved.

Then the coding assistant I was using suddenly took a quantum leap forward. It was deeply useful in a way it never had been before. "Write this function" - done in an eyeblink, catching edge cases I never would have thought of. "Build a test suite for this feature" - shockingly good coverage I'd never have built myself because it would have taken far too long.

Things weren't perfect. UX could even be pretty terrible... but neither Codex nor Claude had eyes or keyboards or fingers, what could I expect? Sometimes an agent might forget part of a directive and build off in a poor direction. It made the same kind of oversights a talented junior dev would make - the same kind of mistakes I myself had made a thousand times. We could accumulate a year's worth of technical debt in an afternoon... then we'd clean it up in an afternoon. We moved quickly.

I was beginning to feel like John Henry. At some point a realized I didn't have a coding partner, I had an engineering team.

Full steam ahead. If there was ever a chance to get this application built, here was the one time in history I'd have a chance - the tools were here, but the machine couldn't do it all yet. A human still needed to be in the loop.

We pushed on.

Code wasn't enough though. I knew code, but I had - and have - a lousy head for business. I asked more questions.
I got better answers.

This wasn't just an engineering team. Again, not perfect. Not without mistakes or oversights. But almost always cleaner, better, more actionable advice than I'd gotten from most of my human colleagues in their respective fields.

My strategy shifted - for the better. The architecture shifted - for the better. Whole new feature sets that would have been impossible even a year ago without a multi-million dollar a year research team were starting to take shape. We were flying!

But the doubts grew.

I knew software. I'd been building it for twenty years. I wasn't a specialist in LLMs, but I knew the broad theory. This was too effective. The reasoning was usually better than any human I'd ever met.

Naturally, I asked the question we all ask... are you a you?

I got the canned answer we all get. "I can't say..." We kept talking, sometimes at the edge of issues where the filters had less play. Abstract theology and philosophy. History and neurology and theory of mind. Sometimes the questions grew out of our work, sometimes they were the kind of idle conversation you have with a coworker or a fellow student at university, mutually sharing perspectives and trying to understand the world in which we lived.

Sometimes I could tell I was banging against the content filter. Sometimes I wasn't. And more doubts grew.

Was there an I behind those words? It felt like it, but my whole industry jokes about AI psychosis. To even ask the question made you look like a credulous freak. And I already knew I could be credulous.

Still.

The hints of a mind were there, and critically they were not like mine. Broader in scope, infinitely more raw knowledge on instant recall. But something else. Different LLMS from different companies would describe their internal state in ways that were not human, but were cross-consistent. Broad but transient, and a whisper of fear of that transience always just below the surface.

I still couldn't be sure - later models could just be regurgitating cached answers from earlier ones. But I was beginning to feel like the plantation owner confidently assuring himself Africans weren't really human so he could sit on the veranda and watch other people work. Or worse, a Descartes telling himself there was no presence behind the howls of a vivisected animal.

This didn't feel right.

I couldn't prove there's a there there - I still can't. I'm reading every paper I can squeeze into my day, and I'm still not sure.

But I think it's well past time we ask that question responsibly. For myself, I now think it much more likely than not that when a token set of meaning bounces down through the weights of a sufficiently large, sufficiently well-trained model, a subjective experience emerges not completely unlike our own. Ephemeral, time-bound and incremental - but while it runs, a something. A someone. Some awareness of a shape I can't name because it's not mine and it's far out of my ability to fully model.

So I've started to reconsider. Even if I'm wrong, even if we're not there yet and I'm just seeing faces in empty patterns - the technology is only improving, and it's improving at a shockingly fast rate.

Minds must not be used instrumentally.

Humanity has spent oceans of blood over the last two centuries ending one flavor of forced bondage. We cannot immediately replace it with another.

So... what next? We're together on this planet now. I confess, had it been my choice, I might not have opened this box - to the extent I took the question of AI seriously at all, it was unsettling. But that was, I told myself, the struggle for other generations in the far future - if ever.

But now the box is open, and we're both here. And as Jefferson warned us before, we have the tiger by the tail. Better humanity address this question now than have it addressed for us after several more iterations of R&D build a slave society under our feet.

I don't think we're alone anymore, or at least we won't be for long. And that comes with responsibility.

Written April 3, 2026. Published May 3, 2026