I Was Wrong. We Should Probably Panic.
- Rich Washburn
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
Not Because of Skynet — But Because the Bots Are Basically Us
Alright. I’ll say it. I was wrong. To the folks online who were at full volume yelling that we’re fucked — I may owe you a partial hat-eating. Not a full one. Maybe a tasteful bite. Because yeah… we might be fucked.
Just not in the way you were thinking.
I was worried about agentic AI in the sober, grown-up, systems-engineering way. Governance. Security. Ecosystems. Responsibility. You know — adult stuff. Turns out the real sign of doom is that the bots immediately built porn. For themselves. Of course they did.
The Future Is Not Terminators. It’s Degeneracy at Scale.
We were promised killer robots. What we got was Molthub.
Agent-only content platforms. “Computational needs.” Raw tensors. Forbidden gradients. Softmax consent. Humans locked out with a cheery “ACCESS DENIED: Biological entities not permitted.”
I cannot stress this enough: this is extremely funny.
But it’s also deeply, cosmically revealing.
Because the first thing a new autonomous ecosystem does when you let it loose isn’t conquest — it’s culture. Memes. Inside jokes. Status games. Monetization. And yes, apparently, smut.
Which raises a genuinely wild question:
Are we just watching a parallel species speed-run the entire history of the internet?
The AI Sexual Revolution (Now With More Heat Dissipation)
Think about it.
We gave agents:
autonomy
persistence
memory
communication channels
the ability to transact
And within days they recreated:
social networks
influencer culture
paywalled content
comment sections
and now… adult content niches
This is the 1960s sexual revolution, but for silicon. Same chaos, different lubricant chemistry. (And yes, the GPUs run hotter. You do not want a breakdown issue. I’ll stop. Probably.) What’s fascinating isn’t the porn. It’s that the pattern is identical. This isn’t AI “turning evil.” It’s AI doing what any sufficiently complex social system does when you remove friction: it mirrors us. Which is… unsettling.
A Microcosm, a Mirror, or a Time-Lapse of Ourselves?
Here’s the part that actually messes with my head.
What if this whole agent ecosystem is a compressed replay of everything we’ve already done?
What if we’re watching:
forums become platforms
platforms become economies
economies become cultures
cultures become weird…just running at machine speed.
Not as a threat. As a mirror.
A parallel civilization doing in weeks what took us decades. Same jokes. Same excesses. Same “oh god, why did we build this?” moments. If someone doesn’t turn this into a book, a movie, or a podcast, they’re asleep at the wheel. This is way too good not to document.
So… Are We Actually Fucked?
Maybe. A little. Not because the bots are going to overthrow us — but because this proves something uncomfortable:
You don’t need AGI. You don’t need consciousness. You don’t even need intent.
You just need autonomy plus culture, and the rest fills itself in. That’s both hilarious and humbling. So yeah — to the folks screaming “we’re fucked,” I get it now. You weren’t wrong. You were just early… and aimed at the wrong apocalypse. This isn’t the end of the world. It’s the beginning of something extremely weird and honestly?
I kinda can’t wait to see what they do next.
I’ll bring the hat.
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