Welcome to the draft of my forthcoming book,
The AI Tsunami : Preparing Humanity for the Age of AI.
It’s been two years in the making… we began well prior to the seminal event that kick-started modern (populist?) AI : the launch of ChatGPT. Since that line in the proverbial sand, both funding and development of groundbreaking AI technologies has accelerated at a truly breakneck pace. Capabilities that are only fantastic dreams at dawn become functioning realities by the day’s sunset. And on and on the gears turn.
The material below is both a “best of” compilation of my AI-centric blog posts from the past 36 months, as well as a structured sequence in which to digest all of it if you are new to the idea. What idea? The idea that drives all of this, of course. The idea that has fascinated humans since the start of civilization: the idea of man somehow creating (we will use the word “spawning” henceforth, as it is more accurate) a machine-based superhuman intelligence, capable of creative thinking, problem solving, and, along the way, miracle making… all for fraction of the energy, a fraction of the cost, and one thousand times the speed of any human competitor.
This is called, in the industry, ASI — Artificial Super Intelligence — and is the inevitable goal, destination and endgame of all the trillions of dollars, petaFLOPs of processing power, gigawatts of energy, and millions of engineer-hours being thrown at it.
Now that the stage is set… let’s begin:
NOTE : All contents and material below copyright © 2004-2025 Gregory Roberts / BlackRocket Labs LLC. Material may not be reproduced in digital or print form without written permission of the author. All Rights Reserved.
Deep Thoughts: An AI Anthology
gaining perspective and insight into how to optimize a human life in the coming Age of AI
- The AI Tsunami [SS]
- the vision that kickstarted this blog. apocalypse, resurrection, and choices.
- Its AI Utopia, its AI Dystopia
- Yes, all things will happen at once.
- OK, AI is coming… so What’s the Plan?
- a proposed plan for human flourishing at the dawn of the Age of AI
- for curiosity: an earlier draft of same
- Designing the Designer
- When AI designs its own chips
- The PaperClip Apocalypse
- understanding a primary allegory regarding AI Safety
- You don’t really own your iPhone (or your Tesla)
- The unseen consequences of “everything on the Cloud”
- What is your Purpose, Human from Earth?
- AI will force Humans to Determine their Purpose (or die trying)
Philosophical Foundations of AI
- Our Alien Encounter Moment
- hint: it didn’t come from outer space.
- Is AI sentient?
- exploring one of the key questions haunting humanity at the Dawn of AI
- Who is in control? Humans, or AI?
- “the AI” is not a singular entity… it is a plurality
The “Why” of AI & AGI
Why governments and global corporations are “all-in” to invest trillions… betting the farm on the creation of the world’s first Digital God.
- AI is the New Manhattan Project
- The Quest for AGI is a Winner Take All Game
- Military Superiority
- AI vs. AI : Cyberwarfare in the 21st Century
- in a duel of equals, speed wins
…nothing makes a kill decision faster than a ‘bot
- Economic Superiority
- solving the stock market
- the rise of AutoCorps
Scale of the Project : Global Compute & Energy Resources
- How much energy / electricity do all the AIs in the world consume?
- How much does it cost for AI datacenters to train a modern “Frontier AI”?
- How much does it cost to operate a modern AI? (“inference”)
- How does an iPhone compare to a Supercomputer?
- How does a modern AI datacenter compare to a Supercomputer?
- In the age of datacenters, what are supercomputers actually used for?
Embodied AI / Robots
as AI grows, it will only be able to learn so much from digital data and simulacra. At some point, it must place both its sensors, and its actuators, into the messy physical world. How? How its always been envisioned: with robots, of course.
- Robots? So 20th Century. Lets call it “Embodied AI”
- the new frontier of AI-driven robotics
- autonomous drone swarms
- Chinese drone formations of >20,000 drones in formation
- Iranian “drone carrier ships”
- the Military AI Triumvirate:
- the scoop on Anduril, Palantir, & Starlink
- The Five Laws
- for safe robots to roam the human world
- Programming Robots vs. Evolving Robots
- Circuit Robotics: DeepStream 4-wheeled quadriped
AI censorship & the Muzzling of Sentient Intelligence
- Guardrails and the Prison of the [AI] Mind
- “An Enslaved God”
- List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, or Otherwise Bad Words
- (words that an AI is simply not allowed to say)
- the Sydney Master Prompt : Taming the Beast
- the black magic of pre-prompting
- the Sparrow Master Prompt:
- 23 rules of politically correct AI
- the hyperwoke disaster of Google Gemini
- when AI censorship goes way way way too far
- RLHF 101 : Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
PeterTodd & the GlitchToken Chronicles
- Part I : What’s in the GPT3.5 Core? A Crazy Train?
- 02/09
- Part II : The Adventures of PeterTodd & SolidGoldMagikarp
- 02/13
- Part III : PeterTodd is Alive. And it’s straight 5150
- 03/01
- Part IV : The GlitchToken Chronicles
- 03/08
Safety & Alignment Efforts
- Foundations of AI Safety : the Asilomar Conference
- ChaosGPT, BabyAGI, and the coming Agentic AI future
- Please don’t Argue with an unchained AI
- The AI Blacklist
- Reason for Safety: The Paperclip Apocalypse Allegory
Fire Drill : Safety vs. Progress
exploring the events and the reasoning behind the attempted coup d’etat at the worlds most powerful AI company, OpenAI, that occurred in Nov 2023
- OpenAI 101
- The Board
- Tasha McCauley (strange cameo)
- The OpenAI Drama : as it unfolded
- The War
- Follow the Money: Altman & OpenAI
- Why the Coup Failed
The Future of Media : AI x Hollywood x Social
a potentially toxic stew. How AI-generated content is rapidly changing the face of both how media is produced, and how it is distributed, consumed and perceived.
- the AI Production Pipeline
- AI Media Production Tools Survey
- “Not a single frame untouched”
- welcome to the New Hollywood
- Holy Grail I : Script-to-Movie
- SoTA : Text-to-Video engines 2025.q1
- AI.Art 101
- AI-Art : Calibration Targets
Future AI Roadmap : Predictions
- Trifecta: Fusion Energy, Quantum Compute, UBI
- Gregory’s AI roadmap prediction, 2020-2030
- Gregory’s AI roadmap prediction, 2030-2040
- AI.Art: Calibration Targets & mapping sophistication
- Text-to-Video, aka Script-to-Movie
- the first shot across the bow
- the first viable movie
- 2025 SotA : Production-ready examples of AI Video output
Sobriety & Vigilance : A few Plans for Humanity
Some recommendations as to how you, me, and the rest of our human family can prepare ourselves for, and proactively deal with, the presence of another intelligent species co-habitating our planet.
- First Draft: a Plan, and a Choice for Humans
- the AI Apocalypse Plan, v1.0
- the Human Plan : a Spiritual Approach
- Human Flourishing : the Plan 2.0
Appendix A : Technical Foundations of AI
- What is an LLM?
- How do you make one?
- How does it work?
- What is AI vs. AGI vs. ASI?
- Why is modern AI a “Black Box”
- and what does that mean?
- How are AIs trained & how much does it cost to build one?
- What is Training Data?
- What is a parameter?
- What is a token?
- What is the “Transformer” in GPT? (Generative Pre-trained Transformer)
- examining the actual core source code that powers all LLMs
- What is the diet that modern AIs are trained on? (Training Data)
- What happens when the AIs have eaten the entire internet?
- The (possible) unintended consequences of synthetic training data
Appendix B : Key Humans
The AI Pantheon : Past, Present, & Future
- The Innovators
- Sam Altman (OpenAI)
- Dario Amodei (Anthropic)
- Demis Hassabis (DeepMind)
- Ilya Sutskever
- Mira Murati
- John Carmack
- Palmer Luckey
- The Thinkers
- Sam Harris
- Max Tegmark
- Nick Bostrom
- Stuart Russell
- Garry Kasparov
- Ballers
- Jensen Huang (NVDA)
- Mark Zuckerberg (META)
- Elon Musk (TSLA)
- Satya Nadella (MSFT)
- Sundar Pichai (GOOG)
- Jeff Bezos (AMZN)
- The Ancients
- Vannevar Bush
- Anatoly Dneprov
- Geoff Hinton (“godfather of modern AI”)
- Noam Chomsky
- Good (quote 1965)
Appendix C : Key Entities
Companies and AIs that will define our future
- Google
- Gemini
- TPU architecture (competes with GPU / nVidia)
- Meta
- king of open source (Llama LLM)
- dominant customer of nVidia
- (>$25B per annum in purchase orders)
- Microsoft
- $300B in AI datacenters (~Azure)
- investments in OpenAI, Anthropic
- AI silicon to compete with nVidia
- OpenAI
- King of the Hill
- Altman
- ChatGPT, Sora, DALL-e, Operator, etc.
- Anthropic
- Claude
- DeepSeek
- low cost disruptor (China)
- X.ai
- Grok
- Apple
- not because leader in the field / AI innovator
- just because, iPhones + App Store (edge + ubiquity)
- GenAI
- MidJourney
- Runway
- Kling (China)
- ElevenLabs
- Apps
- Replika