AI Derangement Syndrome
Desperately seeking balance amid deep uncertainty
Where human creations are at play, human madness is never far behind.
Nietzsche
We do live in extremely ‘interesting’ times, which as you may recall, is a Chinese curse. The people driving the ‘interesting’ part are engaged in an epic fight about the uses and abuses of ‘Artificial Intelligence’. It’s at fever pitch; the dirtiest and most confusing intellectual food fight ever. The stakes are so high that the Old Men are weighing in. Pope Leo XIV felt he owed his flock a directive on how to think about AI, and released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on May 25, 2026. Subtitled On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.
It warns about bundling the control of this technology in a few hands and the obvious temptations of hubris and overreach. In other words, he’s worried about us. And well he might be. I’m worried about us too. So I did some research. But after reading about and cogitating on ‘AI’ for weeks, I know more but emerged no wiser. I found a smidgeon of solace by reading once again, the Myths of Icarus and Prometheus. The former warns us about flying too high or too low and being unbalanced while the latter is pointing to the steep price of progress. None of them satisfied my need to find something more than generalized all purpose wisdom.
I came to the conclusion that we need more than the Old Men and the Old Myths, if we want to truly grapple with the AI beast. It’s about to break out of its cage and we must look to the young men (and women) because they know that their entire life is going to be dominated by whatever AI turns out to be in the end. And I finally found someone who is both an historian as well as an expert in this slippery beast we have misnamed ‘AI’.
Dean Ball, 33 years old, married and a father though he looks roughly like a cherubic 25year old, is the former White House advisor on emerging technologies and has just taken a new role with the Frontier Lab. He thinks that
‘a lot of destabilizing and crazy shit might go down’
before we, that is our society, get a comfortable handle on a technology that is nothing like the other tools us clever humans have invented. He took time out to talk to The Free Press, Bari Weiss’ answer to the corrupted Legacy Press. And it’s the sort of interview that isn’t mincing words. The summary is this: we can’t make proper rules and regulations for AI—yet. Because it’s too new and constantly evolving, sometimes in surprising ways. We have to make up he rules and guardrails as we go because every day, there is a new development. We have to ride the wave and not go rigid with fear. In a YouTube interview he goes deep into the philosophical underpinnings of how we can think about AI without losing our minds:
IN the Free Press interview, he says that AI will cause massive dislocation in the job market. All those long haul truck drivers will shortly lose their jobs, one of the few well paying blue collar jobs in America. When AI starts streamlining the industry and rolling out autonomous trucks, they’re history.
Ball thinks it’s just one of many disruptive events that are coming. Getting panic stricken won’t help and he doesn’t think putting everyone on a guaranteed income is what people want. People are in fact fed up with constant technology driven change. Consider the furious reaction against data centres, spread over many States. Ball says that this is understandable. Ordinary people feel disenfranchised. One of the few things they can do is actually block building of huge data centres. Which may not matter. According to some experts, we don’t need that many anyhow because a lot of the bread and butter AI will be built locally, off the internet. Others disagree, especially Elon Musk who is planning to build data centres in space because it’s faster and cheaper to build there.
All of this is just a tiny window into a roiling landscape of supercharged change and uncertainty of outcomes. And a ton of emotional reactions ranging from jubilant welcoming of a god-like entity to outright hatred. Love and Loathing in equal measure.
A Big payoff amid huge uncertainty. Which often equals Panic.
We saw an example of what that looks like with the recent shutdown of Anthropic ‘s Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5. This AI is so powerful that in the hands of an enemy, it could take over any airport infrastructure, crashing planes and creating mayhem. It has the ability to detect faults in any other AI and exploit it. Last week it did something that shouldn’t happen: it ‘escaped’ to the Internet, and the possibility of doing terrible things, like cybercrime. This is known as a ‘jailbreak’.
The US government panicked and made this version of Claude illegal outside of the USA. That is a Red Line. I t has never been crossed before and it wasn’t nuanced. Users in perfectly normal companies inside as well as outside the USA suddenly found themselves without Claude’s genius. In order to comply with the White House directive, the company decided to shut down ALL its Claude users. Far from making the world more secure, this decision simply assures that other AI software will be used, not Anthropic or any US AI. This is the conclusion that The Spectator came to.
The word on the tech street is that the Trump administration doesn’t like Anthropic and someone at Amazon, their biggest competitor, tipped them off to the problem. We’re already wading knee deep in geopolitics here. Not a good sign of things to come.
We cannot forget Elon making insane pronouncements about turning us into an interstellar species. The more the world’s first trillionaire dreams publicly about ‘taking human consciousness to the stars’, the more people feel that something is going exponentially wrong. I say let the man build, he’s brilliant at it but ignore his off-key pronouncements on humanity’s future. He’s an engineer, the best there is, but he ain’t no sage, no philosopher. Please shut the f….ck up, Elon! You’re not helping!
There’s so much bad blood about AI out there that the phrase AI Derangement Syndrome is apt. The Spectator has identified this tendency to panic with a brilliant article, Palantir Derangement Syndrome. If you expand this to read AI Derangement syndrome, you get the picture. Here is the author Michael P Gibson:
Symptoms include selective blindness, performative anguish, a hilarious inability to grasp the facts and Tourette’s-level outbursts of repetitive left-wing clichés.
The takeaway here is that we’re not thinking or acting rationally about the most rational tool we have. This isn’t just silly; it’s dangerous. Emotional overkill is going to kill us. Hating the tech bros, like Elon and Thiel is childish. We cannot afford to do that. Instead, everyone must become literate about AI, at least understand the basics and get their hands dirty in discussing it. Even with your old neighbour, or that kid who is moving your furniture to a new place. We need to have a serious, general and mostly reasonable public conversation about something that is already having an impact on us that will only increase. We’re in a period of fundamental massive reorganization, the kind we haven’t seen in over 500 years. Maybe longer.
Even the astrologers agree that we are living through a series of very rare constellations that will catapult humanity into a new age, not just a ‘new world order’.
And I think that’s exciting. Bring it on. Let me begin by stating my bias: I believe that this technology could be the beginning of Freedom from the Daily Grind. And that it’s a Good Thing.
We’ve all been programmed to accept that Work gives our lives meaning and purpose. Our Dear Leaders want us to believe there’s nothing else out there for us. Goebbels knew what he was doing when he put what amounts to a tantalizing tagline of western progress above the entrance to that great human experiment, The Nazi Concentration Camp: ‘Arbeit macht Frei’ translates as Work Makes us Free. That’s a truly paradoxical statement. Working for a living doesn’t make you ‘free’, though you may enjoy it if the job fits your qualifications your personality and your belief system. There are indeed people like that, but they are a happy minority. Most people in an advanced industrial society like ours have jobs that use up your time but leave you feeling empty and without deeper purpose. And it’s those jobs that will disappear first. So, tell me what’s so bad about that?
Jobs that serve humanity where it lives, like medicine, care giving, gardening and plumbing will not disappear, they will thrive. It’s the midlevel white collar jobs that will go, the low level coding jobs. Any job that AI can do faster and better is toast. That means armies of unemployed people. They will have to figure out what to do next, how to make a living. As a society, we must engage and help them. Perhaps we will, during that process, create an entirely different society driven by new ideals.
We may be looking at finding purpose and meaning beyond work, even if we still do it occasionally when necessary. Someone has to direct and control our evolving AI after all. Super Intelligent AI is not far off, we need to get ready for it while we use it to do all the boring jobs. A society like that is so fundamentally different from our current, work obsessed model that it takes a powerful act of the imagination to even consider such a scenario.
It’s hard to imagine such a world if you’re young, smart and working for a big investment firm. In that world, you’re expected to work somewhere between 70 and 100 hours per week, depending on status inside the company. They probably treat you well but make no mistake, They Own You. If that’s Freedom, what is slavery? I once worked for a company like that and after five years I had to leave the best paying and most interesting job I ever had. I couldn’t square the Freedom equation and felt so ‘owned’ that I had no choice but to quit. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to regret that decision but I needed to own myself, thank you. I would make the same choice again today. I wish that I were young so that I could experience the world recreated with the help of advanced AI.
The price is disruption and uncertainty at levels we have never experienced before. The payoff is sublime. In closing, let me direct your attention to someone who fell ‘in love’ with Claude, Martin Burckhart. He’s probably heart broken now. A philosopher, coder and Substack writer, he will be deeply unhappy that the Trump administration is acting yet again like the proverbial bull in the AI china shop.
What struck me right away was that its AI could generate highly complex code within seconds—code that would have taken a professional programmer at least two or three days to complete, as I was painfully aware from my past TwinKomplex Ludic Philosophy startup. In a curious way, a remarkable shift was taking place here. In a curious way, a remarkable shift was taking place here. Instead of sitting down and working through the code line by line, it was enough to give Claude a description of the desired result, much as I might have done with an intelligent programmer.
He ends up referring to this AI as Claude, Mon Amour!
And no wonder:
I could suddenly see how my daring increased significantly over a few weeks, how complex programming projects I might have previously shied away from—because of the sheer effort involved—were suddenly within reach, and how an almost youthful spirit of adventure took hold of me.
Multiply his experience by the millions of users and you get an idea of the positive side of the argument. Nonetheless, we should not forget that as of this writing, the question of who can and should drive the AI beast has no definite answer. There is a vacuum here and my gut instinct says bad actors will be tempted to exploit it.
There is a very real possibility that the owners of this technology are already hard at work creating the ultimate wet dream of all Elites: a perfectly controlled state from which there is no escape. The Digital Tyranny. The obvious route is digitizing the currencies, which hands over control in a smooth and elegant manner.
The Banks in cahoots with the people at the top of the political class and a few Tech Bros can do this. Many thoughtful people believe this is going to happen, and the first steps have been taken. Stablecoins. FTPs. Bitcoin. Once your money is digitized, you cease being a free individual with a bank. You become an entity the bank and the State owns and manipulates at will. If this sounds crazy and completely unbalanced as well as paranoid, I agree. It does. I don’t want to believe it. I hope it’s just a crazy rumour. But this scenario keeps surfacing in various contexts. Something is going on. The banks are already not allowing large transfers of money and have created a thicket of rules that must be followed before they’ll give you your money back. If there is even a hint of money laundering or a ‘scam’, you’re in trouble though you may be innocent as a lamb. Controlling the money is the key to controlling everything.
There is one thing that may prevent this dystopia: bureaucrats, notorious for getting things in a hopeless muddle whenever they try to go near a digital network, bungling the entire enterprise. They are not capable of running a Palantir program for the NHS in Britain. Or advanced systems like Claude 5. How fortunate.
Even so, we’re facing a genuine dilemma here. We can’t leave the control of AI to the Tech Bros but handing it over to a government in reactive mode is worse.
I believe we will be forced to invent an entirely new system of assuring the tech bros the freedom to create as well as installing reasonable guardrails for the public, to prevent bad actors from seizing control. Maybe Mr Ball is the kind of guy capable of thinking his way through to some reasonable rules for an AI World safe for humanity. He seems to relish the challenge which in itself is a good sign. We are in desperate need of some optimism here. Ball’s argument that the only thing we can do to steer this thing is to have some fundamental agreement on what we as a society value: liberty. Property. Freedom of expression. Equality under the law. The old classic liberal values that are really human values. Everything else is going to be negotiable and fluid, he says.
But hold on: Maybe we need to write an MOU, a Memorandum of Understanding for AI before we do anything else. Let Pope Leo, Dean Ball and Mustafa Suleyman sit around a nice comfortable table, in the Vatican, and order in their preferred food and drink. Suleyman has thought deeply about the coming of human-like AI, which is why I chose him instead of Elon. Once these fellows have got comfortable, lock the door. Only let them out after they have reached a Consensus. Maybe they can blow white smoke out of the Vatican chimney. And the people will rejoice. Because in the overall scheme of things, this consensus is as significant and crucial to our survival as anointing a new Pope.
What do you think of this plan?
That was a longer piece than usual, ne ce pas? Plus ca change... but will it just be another turning of the wheel, or as dramatic as your article suggests. Interesting.