Grady Booch

I'm reminded of parallels to events in the evangelical religious community.

Finally, we have Heaven's Gate, whose members were certain that aliens following the Hale-Bopp comet were coming to bring them to a next level of existence. As you may recall, all 39 of them committed suicide.

I'm reminded of parallels to events in the evangelical religious community.

Jehovah's Witnesses similarly have predicted Armageddon, first expecting it to take place in 1914, then in 1975, and then as they accounted in 1989, sometime before the end of the 20th century.

I'm reminded of parallels to events in the evangelical religious community.

Then, there were the Shakers - formally named The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing - who also shaped their lives in anticipation of the Second Coming.

I'm reminded of parallels to events in the evangelical religious community.

In the mid-1800s, followers of William Millera quit their jobs and sold all their possessions, in anticipation of the imminent arrival of the rapture on October 22, 1944. Needless to day that did not happen, leading to what is called The Great Disappointment.

Contemporary frontier models are not conscious.

However, I also assert that we are perhaps generations away from making that manifest: we lack the proper architectures to address these exquisite properties of the mind, and furthermore, we don't even have a sufficient understanding to lead us us to even ask the right questions to design them.

Contemporary frontier models are not conscious.

We are self-directed, our behavior driven by our self-generated goals and desires and wants and needs.

Contemporary frontier models are not conscious.

We are orders of magnitude more complex. We are embodied and so live in an ocean of massive amounts of useless, inconsistent, contradictory, and incomplete information.

Contemporary frontier models are not conscious.

We are mortal, a constraint that shapes and colors our behavior. We have agency. We generate abstractions. We build models of the word, of others, and of our selves, and we have mechanisms to test the structure and consistency of those models against the reality we perceive.

Contemporary frontier models are not conscious.

One might argue that humans are just the same: we are complex, stateful, and stochastic, we have the capacity for introspection, some are more coherent than others, and we are all most definitely unreliable.

Contemporary frontier models are not conscious.

Indeed, the word itself is sufficiently void of anything but casual and subjective meaning such that it is counterproductive to apply it in any rational discourse at the intersection of the mind and computing.

The Computers Booch, 2026

The large language models at the center of most contemporary frontier AIs have on the order of 100 layers of various kinds: recurrent, embedding, normalization, feed forward, attention, and others.

As far as we know, cortical columns are found in every sentient living organism: reptiles have columns with three layers, humans have columns with six layers…

The large language models at the center of most contemporary frontier AIs have on the order of 100 layers of various kinds: recurrent, embedding, normalization, feed forward, attention, and others.

While these models may include considerable symbolic harnesses together with a smattering of other neural components, they are all essentially a system with a single column.

Let’s be very clear: there is value in automating tedious and repetitive and dangerous tasks; there is value in delegating certain work to our machines that can do the work tirelessly and much faster.

But at the same time, let us remember that there is value in the activity of engaging one’s mind and body to discover, to understand, to create, and yes, even to struggle and overcome.