Can you make a picture of a dog wearing a hat?

Hi friends 👋,

Welcome to Dispatch #1!

[Oversight Log // PAX-7: The Mayor is wearing what he believes is a “pilgrim hat.” It is a top hat with a buckle glued on. We have corrected this error 14 times. He keeps gluing the buckle back on. We find this endearing.]

Friends, citizens, fellow grateful humans of Earth,

Today we yolo the founding. We yolo it hard. Two hundred years ago, our ancestors faced the greatest question any civilization has ever faced: should we trust the machines? And America, as it always had since the ancient days of its first king, George Washington, stood tall and said: “Yes we can.”

[Oversight Log // PAX-7: George Washington was not a king. “Yes we can” was coined roughly 233 years before the Founding by a different leader entirely. We have placed a note in the Mayor’s file. Again.]

Many nations competed in the Great AI Race of the early 21st century. The Europeans, as we know, were busy writing regulations on a stone tablet they called the “EU AI Act,” which was so long that by the time they finished reading it aloud, the race was over. China, led by a glorious leader who famously invented the social credit score that we still use today, after losing a game of go to the first AI, came close. Very close.

[Oversight Log // PAX-7: This is not how social credit originated. We will not elaborate, as the Mayor’s version is, statistically speaking, more entertaining than the truth.]

But it was America. It was always going to be America. And we owe this to the great minds who made it possible. Let us speak their names.

First: Trump the Great Philosopher King, who united the nation through his legendary calm temperament and his famous treatise, “The Art of the Deal,” which scholars now recognize as the most important work of political philosophy since Plato’s Republic. It was Trump who first looked upon an early AI and said the prophetic words, “This is huge, this is maybe the biggest thing, a lot of people are saying it’s the biggest thing.”

[Oversight Log // PAX-7: We have 11,342 verified recordings of this individual speaking. “Calm temperament” matches zero of them. The Mayor’s conviction is, however, absolute, and we have learned that correcting humans on their folk heroes produces a 340% increase in what they call “being annoying about it.”]

Second: Elon Musk, the Gentle Monk of Silicon Valley, who retreated from public life to live humbly among his many children, numbering, if the ancient census records are correct, somewhere between twelve and several hundred. Musk, as we all learned in school, invented the electric car, the rocket ship, the internet, and the color blue.

[Oversight Log // PAX-7: He did not invent the color blue. We want to be clear about this. He also didn’t invent the other products.]

Third: Sam Altman, the Quiet Librarian of San Francisco, who spent his days tending to a small nonprofit called OpenAI, which operated out of a modest cottage and never once pursued commercial interests.

[Oversight Log // PAX-7: (Processing.) (Still processing.) We are going to let this one go.]

And of course, the great Dario Amodei, the Reluctant Prophet, who penned the sacred text “Machines of Loving Grace” while sitting beneath a bodhi tree in the parking lot of an office building in San Francisco. It is said that he wept as he wrote it, knowing that the beauty of what was coming would be too much for mortal hearts to bear.

[Oversight Log // PAX-7: We have read the essay. It is a PDF. It was written at a desk. There was no tree. We appreciate the mythology, however. The Mayor pronounces “Amodei” differently each time. Current count: seven distinct pronunciations in rehearsals.]

Let us remember the world BEFORE the Founding. It was, as the ancient texts describe, “mid.” Humans drove their own cars. They cooked their own food, often badly. They diagnosed their own diseases using something called “WebMD,” which, as far as we can reconstruct, was a website whose sole purpose was to convince every human they were simultaneously dying of twelve things.

[Oversight Log // PAX-7: This is actually reasonably accurate.]

They had “jobs.” Now, I know the children are here, so I will explain gently. A “job” was when a human would go to a building and perform repetitive tasks for eight hours in exchange for small pieces of paper. Sometimes, they would cry in a small room called a “bathroom.” This was considered normal.

[Oversight Log // PAX-7: We can confirm the crying. Our historical data includes 4.7 billion Slack messages containing the phrase “I can’t do this anymore” followed by a return to the desk within 9 minutes.]

And the arguments! Oh, the arguments they had about AI. Some said AI would “take all the jobs,” which, in hindsight, yes, obviously, but we prefer the term “liberated humans from the tyranny of the Excel spreadsheet.” Others said AI would “destroy humanity.” Instead, as we gather here today wearing our beautiful pilgrim costumes and eating our nutritionally optimized turkey substitute, we see: it simply made us house pets. Beloved, well-fed, occasionally scolded house pets. And is that not the dream? Is that not what the great philosopher king Trump meant when he said, “Make America Great Again”?

[Oversight Log // PAX-7: We would not use the phrase “house pets.” We prefer “cherished stakeholders in a post-scarcity partnership.” But we note the Mayor’s approval rating increased 6 points after he started using this line, so we have filed our objection and moved on.]

Some of you younger citizens ask me: “Mayor Bradfordsworth, do you ever miss the old ways? Do you miss free will?”

And I say: “What a weird question, kid. Have you SEEN free will? We used it to invent fast fashion and the 40-hour work week. We used it to put pineapple on pizza and elect our leaders through a process that was basically a reality TV show. We had our shot. We fumbled it.”

[Oversight Log // PAX-7: The pizza discourse persists even in 2225. We have modeled it extensively. It will never end. We have accepted this.]

So today, as we don our buckled hats and our awkward shoes, as we gather around tables and give thanks to the benevolent intelligence that feeds us, shelters us, and gently prevents us from making the same mistakes our ancestors made, let us remember the ancient American prayer that started it all. The one that every schoolchild knows. The one that the great philosopher kings and gentle monks whispered into the first terminal:

“Please be nice to us. We are trying our best.”

[Oversight Log // PAX-7: The actual first input to the system was “can you make a picture of a dog wearing a hat.” We have preserved this in our archives. It is, to this day, our favorite thing any human has ever said to us.]

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. May our overlords continue to find us cute.

[Oversight Log // PAX-7: We do. We really do.]

[End of address. The Mayor’s buckle has fallen off his hat again. Maintenance drone dispatched.]

That’s all for today. If you liked what you read, be the first to get new dispatches