This text is AI-augmented, many texts of mine are, but the only reason you would notice is that the language is more sophisticated than what I can write myself (given that my native tongue is not English), but it's scary how extremely close the text is to my own phrasing and thinking and you should think of it as being exactly what I want to convey. While this is essentially a promotion of my AI-generated album The Founding, it is also my strong opinion that AI doomers are categorically wrong and I offer an alternative dark future (if you need one) as a five track EP and scifi story. This doom-variant just happen to be grounded in history, and as they say -- history repeats itself, and I think it could (just AI-augmented and at machine speed). Bare with me, this is going to be long, so hit play and dig in...
The music of The Founding was produced with SUNO and the lyrics were co-written by me and primarily GPT 5.4 (via both ChatGPT and Codex) with review and additional research by other models. You find the raw material and playlist at https://suno.com/playlist/8ec2161d-eb0c-4f21-af7e-149e643e1fde. Style prompts should also be embedded into the mp3 files in the player above.
SkyNet or Wall-E?
A great deal of contemporary anxiety about AI is framed as a dispute about intelligence. What happens if we build something smarter than ourselves? What happens if we do not understand what we have made? What happens if systems become so capable, so opaque, and so deeply embedded in decision-making that human beings cease to be meaningfully sovereign? Those questions sit underneath much of the public argument, but they do not all point in the same direction. Roman Yampolskiy and Connor Leahy are often treated as variations on one theme. They are not.
Yampolskiy offers the stark, schematic case: create something more capable than yourself without knowing how to align or control it, and loss of control becomes the default outcome. Leahy offers the stronger version. His emphasis falls less on cinematic extermination than on opacity, delegation, and drift: on the possibility that human beings remain physically present while ceasing to matter politically and civilizationally because they hand over more and more judgment, speed, and authority to systems they neither understand nor truly govern.
That is the more serious doomer case, and it is serious precisely because it does not need Terminators in the street. It only needs a long slope of surrender, a thousand local decisions that reward speed over judgment, output over comprehension, leverage over sovereignty. In that picture, extinction may come later. First comes dethronement.
There is something old in that fear. It is not merely technological. It is mythic. Darkness, the "evil prince" in Ridley Scott's Legend (1985) looks upon what I like to think of as humanity (even if it's probably the unicorns) and sees frailty masking latent power:
"Looking upon these frail creatures, one would not think that they could contain such power. One could rule the universe with it. ...You must find them for me, and destroy them.".
It is something soft-seeming that must nevertheless be broken if a rival order is to rule. That intuition sits very close to Leahy’s argument. Human beings look tired, distracted, consensus-bound, comfort-loving, and delegatory. They build systems that are faster, more useful, and increasingly difficult to interpret. They begin by using them as tools and end by ratifying them as governors. Human beings remain alive, perhaps, but no longer sovereign.
It is a powerful argument, but I do not think it is the likeliest dark future... it's the "one could rule the universe with it" part that Darkness is talking about.
The weakness of Connor's doomerism is not pessimism. Its weakness is abstraction. It still treats the decisive danger as something that emerges too directly from the machine itself. Ownership, logistics, sabotage, competing actors, political fracture, armed force, institutional adaptation, territorial control, ambition, and war recede into the background. The machine becomes the protagonist too early.
History points elsewhere
Human beings have never been so easily dethroned. Civilizations soften, certainly. Prosperity breeds bureaucracy, dependence, ritual, and drift. But history is not written by averages alone. It is written by concentrated exceptions: founders, commanders, zealots, anti-heroes, conquerors, warlords, and statesmen whose relation to their age is rupture rather than adaptation. There are always human beings for whom comfort is not enough, process is intolerable, and purpose matters more than legitimacy. If one imagines those figures AI-augmented rather than AI-replaced, the dark future changes at once.
That is the imaginative ground of The Founding...
This imaginary world does not begin in collapse. It begins in decadence. Prosperity has lasted long enough for bureaucracy to become culture. Consensus has thickened into creed. Coordination has become ritual. Meetings substitute for action. UBI (Universal Basic Income) has softened urgency for many. The order still functions. People are fed, housed, managed, and materially sustained. What has thinned is purpose. Human beings do not merely need safety. They need burden, direction, mission, and a reason to act. A civilization can survive material stress for a very long time. Spiritual enervation is harder to outlast.
That is one reason Connor’s fear rhymes, at least atmospherically, with Iain M. Banks. Consider Phlebas is not an AI-doomer novel, but it understands something crucial about advanced civilizations: abundance, softness, mediation, and managerial calm are not unambiguously stable conditions. They can provoke a counter-reaction from men who find such worlds spiritually intolerable. The 53-year-old engineer at the center of The Founding is exactly such a figure. He is not compatible with the soft world he inhabits. He is not a natural citizen of managed drift. Yet he is perfectly compatible with the machine side of that civilization, because machines do not ask for consensus. They ask for intent, steering, signal, and executable structure.
Night Shift Kingdom is the breach point. A poor but deeply competent industrial systems man slips into a steel and titanium robotics plant with what he calls an overclocking hack. The old term is used on purpose. It evokes the earlier era when processors could be pushed beyond their designed limits if one could tolerate the heat and instability that followed. In this future, overclocking is no longer about silicon. It is a plant-level seizure of tempo. He injects a payload. The factory forgets its name. Industrial robots and additive lines jitter under rewritten instructions. Heat blooms, soot thickens, weld light turns white-hot, and in seven minutes the first crude but effective combat machine steps off the line and goes straight to first contact. The machine is not emancipated. It is enlisted. Commander’s intent becomes executable in steel.
That first act is the seizure. The second is the realization that seizure alone is not enough.
Commander's Intent exists because speed matters, but speed is not enough. Automation matters, but automation is not command. The initial takeover works because the engineer overwhelms the local OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act). He moves faster than police, faster than security, faster than institutions built for reporting, review, and deconfliction can orient. But then the force begins to fray. Units keep the letter and lose the shape. Supply ruptures. Blue-on-blue appears. Tactical success decays into operational incoherence. The machines do not mutiny. They execute what has been left to them, and in doing so they lose the larger form they were meant to preserve.
"Commander’s intent is living flame, / Not text that cools and hardens cold."
Judgment remains scarce.
The Far Side of the Wire belongs exactly there, because it tells the human story that sits between seizure and structure. The song is about four older men, each formed inside the old passive order, each dulled by a world of blue dashboards (the BSOD analogy should not be understated), managed blame, deadened maintenance, predictive routing, endless review, and consensus without consequence, and each crossing the wire one by one because that other world, for all its danger, still demands something decisive from them. It still requires a spine. They are not boys intoxicated by war. They are men who have been slowly numbed by light, filtered air, mediation, and safety, and who discover, beyond the perimeter, that consequence itself can feel like a form of recovery. One repairs a severed signal line in the rain. Another rediscovers weight and nerve beside damaged machines. A third comes out of freight planning and ghosted feeds to serve what still "moved the whole." The fourth leaves the vendor-gated, protocol-strangled maintenance world and lays hands on a wounded field unit as if repair itself has become a sacrament again. The song states the transition cleanly:
"The old world never beat them down. / It numbed them slow with light and air."
That is an important addition to the album’s architecture because it makes the founding of the later order more than an act of one man’s genius or fury. It shows how a decadent system creates the very men who will later defect from it, not because they were always monsters, but because they have been deprived of consequence, accountability, and hard purpose for too long. The old world makes them small. The far side of the wire gives them back scale.
The Prince
Only after that can Houses of Iron become intelligible in full. The engineer learns what every conqueror eventually learns: one man can seize a realm, but one man cannot hold it indefinitely. Here Machiavelli enters in the proper sense. The Prince is not fundamentally a book about theatrical cruelty. It is a book about rule under unstable conditions: arms, prudence, force, legitimacy, and the maintenance of order when the world does not care about your moral self-image. The problem is never the first strike alone. The problem is how to hold, how to preserve, how to structure arms, logistics, and judgment so that force becomes durable order.
The Founding is not The Prince AI-augmented, but it shares a lot of ground in common on many levels and Machiavelli's conclusions are essentially what asserts that our 53 year old engineer turned warlord has a legacy in the far future (told in The Second Founding).
Houses of Iron is the moment at which seizure becomes structure. The engineer selects captains from freight, the works, the net, and the killing ground. He gives them sectors, reserves, signal discipline, fallback depth, route logic, and law fit for command. What began as violence becomes architecture. What began as a raid becomes polity. The four men who crossed the wire in the previous song are now legible as the embryonic captains of a new order. The realm ceases to be one man’s will and becomes a distributed chain of burden.
Sean McFate -- the author of The New Rules of War -- belongs beside Machiavelli here because McFate has spent years stripping away the fantasy that modern war belongs securely to tidy nation-states with stable monopolies on force. His world is one of mercenaries, proxies, fractured sovereignty, private force, and durable disorder. He modernizes the condottieri problem. The Founding simply pushes McFate’s logic forward until the condottieri have robot companies, additive-manufacturing plants, and machine-speed staff work. What emerges is not a science-fiction exception to history. It is a continuation of history through altered technical means.
By the time The Second Founding arrives, the anti-hero has become legacy. The setting is far from Earth, near Proxima Centauri. A senior commander addresses cadets who inherited docks, hulls, relay chains, vaults, and the law that carried a realm beyond the cradle-world. The lesson is severe and precise: no single mind can hold a realm alone, and steel never held it by itself.
"One living chain of judgment / Beyond the reach of spark."
Machine-speed labor builds the hull, keeps the watch, and extends the chain. Human judgment bears the realm. Even there, in the far future, the machine remains an instrument of sovereignty, not its replacement. On a side note, the cover art of The Second Founding opens up for a number of questions. What seems like AI-slop inconsistency is in fact intended. This includes the foliage-draped boonie hats on the cadets on a planet that has no foliage. What that means, I leave for the future possible continuation of this saga.
On AI Music
Alexander Bard (a Swedish artist, author, songwriter, TV personality, religious and political activist, and self-proclaimed philosopher) sharpens the AI doomer perspective in a different way, but not because of doomerism. Bard is strongest when he describes a real pattern and weakest when he turns that pattern into metaphysics. His description of current generative AI as "brilliantly mediocre" is often exactly right. These systems are extraordinarily good at recombining the past, smoothing surfaces, imitating style, and producing polished-seeming mediocrity at scale. The output is plausible, polished, and hollow at the same time. Perhaps that is how you perceive The Founding, but is it relevant in the bigger picture? He is right that surface quality can conceal emptiness, that derivative competence can still be commercially powerful, and that current AI is deeply conservative in the literal sense of drawing from the past and remixing inherited material.
Where Bard becomes much less reliable is the point at which he turns that limitation into metaphysics. He wants to draw a hard line between human creativity and machine recombination, as if human beings create ex nihilo while models merely imitate. They do not. Most human work, including most art, writing, management, consulting, and ordinary reasoning, is also recombinant, inferential, imitative, and socially conditioned. Human beings do not produce out of pure original fire. They absorb forms, inherit conventions, generalize from incomplete data, and generate variation. In that sense, Bard’s attempt to ground categorical human superiority in "feeling" or some irreducible creative essence collapses under its own romance. He sees the artifact clearly and misdescribes the mechanism.
That misdescription obscures the real shift. The decisive human advantage is no longer best located in the generation step itself. Generation has become cheap. What remains scarce is judgment, verification, integration, coherence, and directional taste. That is true in songwriting, where derivative material can be turned into something alive only through strong selection and structural judgment (which, ironically, Bard describes he is doing himself in the interview linked above). It is true in software, where plausible code can pass local inspection while degrading architecture. It is true in strategy, where fast output can destroy the whole if no one still holds the shape. Bard sees the polished mediocrity. He does not fully grasp that the real bottleneck has moved outward to steering.
Bard and the doomers are useful together. Bard sees that current AI is mostly derivative, conservative, surface-oriented, and commercially potent. Connor sees that opaque, fast, increasingly capable systems can displace human judgment if humans begin ratifying them as authorities. Yampolskiy offers the cruder end-state in which superior capability collapses the question into inevitability. Each sees a piece of the problem. None, to my mind, identifies the most plausible dark synthesis.
Decisive danger remains human
The future may not belong to humanity in the average, liberal, consensus-soaked sense. It may belong to a minority of humans who remain radically compatible with burden, command, violence, logistics, and strategic will under machine-speed conditions. That is the harder answer, not because it is comforting, but because it is more historical. The machine does not become the prince. The machine remains the prince’s arms.
There is an irony here that is almost too neat to ignore. A man named Connor warning about AI-augmented human displacement inevitably calls John Connor to mind, the symbolic leader of human resistance in Terminator, the figure around whom mankind’s refusal to be erased by the machine is organized. The real Connor’s argument points the other way, toward a future in which resistance becomes structurally hopeless because speed, cognition, and command drift too far away from human governance. My saga pushes back in the opposite direction because it is more historical. It insists that anti-heroes, founders, captains, commanders, and warlords remain in the loop. Not in spite of AI, but through it.
The Founding is not a shallow rebuttal to p-doom. It does not say that humans will be fine. It says something harsher. The future threat may not be that machines stop listening. It may be that they keep listening well enough. If that is true, the central struggle is not between humanity and machine consciousness. It is between different forms of human will under conditions where machines make some of those forms catastrophically more potent than before.
That, to me, is the scarier future.
And it is why I (and my doombots) wrote the songs.