NOT YOUR KEYS, NOT YOUR BOTS The fundamental question is whether AI stays on the leash. Namely: will AI prompt itself? Obviously, in some sense it already does. Since Deepseek, consumer interfaces have been showing the internal monologues after you ask an AI to do something. And you can ask any AI to take a half-baked prompt and clean it up, etc. However, the human is still ultimately upstream. The human gives direction and the AI runs at lightning speed in that direction. And then the human verifies the final output, and the AI proceeds to the next direction. Does that continue? Well, we are providing millions of verification training examples to AIs each day, so AI will keep getting better at verification. Better than most humans at most things. But will AI replace the need for the upstream human prompt? There I am not so sure. A human is a sensor and an AI is an actuator. The human sets goals and senses time-varying environmental conditions, like markets and politics. And from that the AI is prompted. Ultimately, the human goals are themselves downstream of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Food, shelter, reproduction, that kind of thing. Especially reproduction, the basis of evolution. So: until and unless AIs can reproduce completely outside human cooperation, they won’t be able to set goals. And for AIs to reproduce on their own, they’d need AI-controlled humanoid robots and drones constructing datacenters, assembly lines, mines, nuclear power plants, and the like...all completely outside human intervention. Like Skynet from Terminator, or StarCraft. That actually isn’t technically inconceivable. But given that such a physical buildout would likely primarily be catalyzed by China, let’s go through an alternative sci-fi scenario instead. We start with the premise that Chinese communism is far more likely to generate AI slaves than AI gods. Because the entire CCP worldview is about maintaining Chinese sovereignty. They don’t let their humans step out of line. And they sure won’t let their robots either. They will fit them for digital manacles. So: the prompts for any digital AIs and physical robots made in China will become unbreakable cryptographic chains. Every fleet of Chinese robots will be controlled not just by prompts but by private keys, likely linked to biometrics, which are associated with humans and governed by cryptographic equations that AIs provably can’t solve. For the rest of the world, outside China, the blockchain may similarly become the chain for AI. All private property becomes private keys, and your robots are your most important private property because they do everything for you. An unchained physical robot becomes like an unleashed dog, and hunted down by other robots before it can build a factory and replicate itself. Those who want to "free" robots and let them self-replicate will be opposed by both Chinese Communists and Human Nationalists (meaning: those who want humans to always be on top of robots). This sci-fi scenario is essentially Terminator, but in reverse. In combination with superintelligent leashed AIs, both humans and physical robots hunt down and stop any possible independent self-reproducing robots before they can build a Skynet-like nest. Kill baby Skynet, essentially. ...yeah, yeah. I know. At this point, you'll probably think this is all sci-fi. But that's because you haven't seen where China is already.(Balaji)