Test Bio Please Ignore
Charlie Sanders
Karma: 99
Charlotte, USA—ACX Spring Schelling 2026
We Need to Be Able to Talk About AI Use
Self-play is the foundational element of recursive self-improvement — it’s what allowed AI systems to bootstrap to superhuman performance in Chess and Go through effectively unbounded iteration. That said, there’s likely a meaningful spectrum within self-play that depends on the independence and algorithmic sophistication of the evaluating role.
Not all self-play is created equal in this regard. Purely rivalrous, symmetric self-play (like white versus black in Go) represents one end of that spectrum, while asymmetric arrangements with structurally distinct roles (like author and critic) may occupy a qualitatively different position — particularly when the critic brings independent evaluative criteria rather than simply optimizing against the same objective from the opposing side. The degree to which the feedback signal is decoupled from the generative process likely matters a great deal for how “recursive” the improvement truly feels.
In case you’re curious, here’s the current output:
February 15th Story
The chart said Adaeze Okonkwo, fifteen months, and Dr. Rao already knew what was coming before Patty leaned into the doorframe of her office.
“Mrs. Okonkwo is in Room 2. She’s here for the MMR.”
Patty said it the way she’d been saying things lately, with the emphasis shifted just enough to signal trouble. She held a printout against her chest, the state medical board letterhead visible at the top.
“I know what it says,” Dr. Rao told her.
“I’m just making sure you saw the updated memo. ‘Administering non-recommended vaccines without documented clinical justification may constitute grounds for license review.’” Patty read it like a weather report. “‘Physicians are advised to exercise caution consistent with the revised federal schedule.’”
Dr. Rao took the paper. She’d read the original version three weeks ago when the CDC’s advisory committee had moved MMR from “routine” to “optional, parental discretion,” a category that hadn’t existed six months prior. The language was new. The meaning was not.
“She’s my last appointment,” Dr. Rao said. “I’ll handle it.”
Patty nodded and pulled the door shut behind her. Through the wall, Dr. Rao could hear the muffled syllables of a toddler’s voice, the particular pitch of a child discovering the crinkle of exam table paper.
She set the memo on her desk, squared it against the corner, and stood.
Grace Okonkwo sat in the molded plastic chair with her daughter on her lap. She wore a navy peacoat and had her purse on the floor between her feet, both hands occupied with keeping Adaeze from lunging toward the cartoon frog poster. The child had Grace’s wide forehead and her father’s dimpled chin, and she was reaching for the frog with the absolute confidence of someone who had never been told no about anything that mattered.
“Dr. Rao.” Grace’s voice was steady, rehearsed. “I’m here for her MMR. I called ahead. Your office confirmed you still carry it.”
“We do.” Dr. Rao sat on the rolling stool and opened the chart on her tablet. She could feel the shape of the conversation before it started, the way you feel weather change in your knees. “Mrs. Okonkwo, I want to be straightforward with you. The federal schedule was updated last month. MMR is no longer on the recommended list for this age group. It’s been moved to an optional category.”
“I know what they did.”
“If I administer it without a documented clinical justification, my license could be reviewed. That’s new as of this month.”
Grace shifted Adaeze to her other hip. The child grabbed a fistful of her mother’s braids and pulled. Grace didn’t flinch.
“Emeka was three,” she said. “My son. He got measles at his daycare in Silver Spring. A place with a waiting list. A place I thought was safe.” She paused, not for effect but because the next part still cost her something. “He had a hundred-and-five fever for four days. The infection spread to his ears. He lost thirty percent of the hearing in his left ear. He wears a hearing aid now. He’s seven.”
Dr. Rao set the tablet down.
“I am not here to argue about policy,” Grace continued. “I am not confused. I am not hesitant. I want my daughter vaccinated. I’ll pay out of pocket. I’ll sign whatever you need me to sign.”
“It’s not about the money, Mrs. Okonkwo.”
“I know it’s not about the money.” Grace looked at her directly. “It’s about whether you’ll do it.”
The room was quiet except for Adaeze, who had found the crinkle paper again and was tearing a strip of it with great satisfaction. The fluorescent light buzzed at a frequency Dr. Rao had stopped noticing fifteen years ago and was noticing now.
The government shipment of vaccines hadn’t come. It was 1987, and measles was moving through the slum east of her father’s clinic faster than anyone had predicted. Her father drove to a veterinary supply depot in Secunderabad and bought what he could, then spent three days sterilizing, reconstituting, dosing by hand with a chart he’d drawn himself on the back of an invoice. No authorization. No documentation anyone would accept. Fourteen children. No deaths.
He never talked about it. Her mother described it only once, late at night after his funeral.
Dr. Rao looked at Adaeze, who had stopped tearing the paper and was now trying to fit her entire fist into her mouth. She had four teeth, the front ones, and she was grinning around her knuckles.
The supply cabinet was three steps away. The MMR vials were on the second shelf, behind the varicella, exactly where they’d been for twenty-two years.
“Lay her down for me,” Dr. Rao said.
Grace exhaled and eased Adaeze onto the table. The child kicked once, twice, then went still as Grace placed a hand on her belly. Dr. Rao opened the cabinet, pulled the vial, checked the lot number and expiration. She drew the dose into a syringe, flicked it, pressed the plunger until a single bead appeared at the needle’s tip.
She swabbed the child’s left thigh. Adaeze looked at the cartoon frog.
Dr. Rao gave the shot, withdrew the needle, and pressed a cotton ball to the puncture. Adaeze’s face crumpled for two seconds, then reset. Grace scooped her up.
Dr. Rao dropped the syringe into the sharps container, heard it click against the plastic, and wrote the lot number in the chart.
It’s Not That Hard to Build Recursively Self-Improving AI
This story was inspired by considering what different possibilities the use of AI models might unlock. One potential area is ludicrously deep technical expertise, of the kind that eclipses the potential of even the most in-depth research. I think of these stories as having “hyperdetails”, details so specific that they transcend the fourth wall with the reader.
Pygmalion’s Wafer
I was struck by the disparity in inflation results shown by https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/g20-inflation-tracker-august-2025/, with China being a clear outlier in global inflation performance. However, I struggled to take that data and visualize why deflation is generally regarded as economically destructive, or how. I think fiction is an underappreciated way to convey complicated topics, so here’s a story that tries to demonstrate the underlying mechanisms of deflationary spirals, also known as “Involution”.
LLM Disclaimer: LLM assistance was used in drafting this story.
Communism By Another Name
Newcomber
In Darkness They Assembled
Of Loving Grace
Thank you! I think there’s a lot of value to be explored in increasing peoples’ awareness of AI progress via fiction.
Sea Change
Hello World
The Polite Coup
Sparks of Consciousness
There’s a parallelism here between the mental constructs you’re referring to and the physical architecture of the human body. For instance, each lobe of our brain has been associated with various tasks, goals, and activities. When you take a breath, your Medulla Oblongata has taken in information about levels of carbon dioxide in the blood via pH monitoring, decided that your blood has too much carbon dioxide, and has sent a request to the respiratory center to breathe. But you’ve also got a cerebral cortex that also gets a say in the decisions made by the respiratory center, and those two brain areas negotiate via highly complex, fully unconscious interactions to decide what directive the respiratory center actually follows.
To summarize: you’re now breathing manually.
I do not believe that 3a is sufficiently logically supported. The criticism of AI risk that have seemed the strongest to me have been about how there is no engagement in the AI alignment community about the various barriers that undercut this argument. Against them, The conjecture about what protein folding and ribosomes might one have the possibility to do really weak counterargument, based as it is on no empirical or evidentiary reasoning.
Specifically, I believe further nuance is needed about the can vs will distinction in the assumption that the first AGI to make a hostile move will have sufficient capability to reasonably guarantee decisive strategic advantage. Sure, it’s of course possible that some combination of overhang risk and covert action allows a leading AGI to make some amount of progress above and beyond humanity’s in terms of technological advancement. But the scope and scale of that advantage is critical, and I believe it is strongly overstated. I can accept that an AGI could foom overnight—that does not mean that it will, simply by virtue of it being hypothetically possible.
All linked resources and supporting arguments have a common thread of taking it for granted that cognition alone can give an AGI a decisive technology lead. My model of cognition is instead of a logarithmically decreasing input into the rate of technological change. A little bit of extra cognition will definitely speed up scientific progress on exotic technological fronts, but an excess of cognition is not fungible for other necessary inputs to technological progress, such as the need for experimentation for hypothesis testing and problem solving on real world constraints related to unforeseen implementation difficulties related to unexplored technological frontiers.
Based on this, I think the fast takeoff hypothesis falls apart and a slow takeoff hypothesis is a much more reasonable place to reason from.
Agreed. There’s really a continuum here, where the rate of self-improvement can range from sublinear to fully exponential. Processes that lack a mechanism for feeding improvements back into the system’s underlying intelligence are unlikely to achieve exponential growth; they’ll tend to plateau or progress linearly at best.
One takeaway is that an effective regulatory regime aimed at limiting fast-takeoff risk might focus precisely on this distinction — restricting processes that iteratively improve at greater than a linear rate.