The bootloader
The other day, in my ears, a podcast.
Someone talking about an idea of Sam Altman’s. An idea I haven’t managed to shake since: we might be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence. Our role in the story: boot up the machine. Then step aside. Become a branch of the evolutionary tree that just stops there.
And he says it just like that, an acceptable scenario. Doesn’t seem particularly bothered by his own words.
The next day, I went for a run.
The run
Easy pace, but it was already too hot. Late May, and a full-summer heat. The kind of heat you call not normal while knowing full well it’s becoming the norm. (Confirmed: the hottest day ever recorded in May in France.)
The birds were still singing, the calm was there. It’s the season for it.
And me, I was running with my brain in overdrive.
Usually, running clears me out. I think about everything and nothing, life, work, it comes in, it goes out, I listen to my breathing, my stride, I take in the calm, the scenery… A kind of active meditation, basically.
That day, it was the opposite. I was chewing it over, bootloader, AI, heat…
And a detail it took me a while to notice: that session, that run, an AI had written it for me.
Mine.
Ouroboros
I still have fun vibecoding my running app. Since the last article, it has grown a lot. It generates my training plans, I tweak them, it handles cross training, it yells at me when I don’t hold my paces…
And I added something I’m absurdly proud of: memory.
A long memory, which spots the notable facts from our exchanges and sets them aside. A shorter one, which sums up the last fifteen days. All of it feeds the coach continuously, so it’s more relevant, so it adapts to my preferences, my tone. So there’s no more of that feeling of being forgotten between two conversations.
I spent evenings teaching a machine to remember me.
Except.
Except that, beyond burning through millions of tokens, with everything that pumps somewhere, to generate a plan I could have written myself, what’s the point?
I built, for pure pleasure, with the very tech that scares me, a perfectly useless thing that consumes exactly what I’m afraid my children will run short of.
The snake eating its own tail.
The filter
At home, my kids get very little screen time. A bit of Switch once or twice a week, a film now and then. In a week they get roughly the daily average.
The subject isn’t taboo. We talk about it. Films, series, video games, social media, the danger for kids with no filter and no perspective. AI too. The fact that you can’t really believe everything you see. That it’s powerful, that it lets you create on demand, and that some people use it for the worst, too.
In the morning, I put up barriers against the machine.
During the day at work, in the evening on my couch, I help it grow.
I don’t even feel like a hypocrite. It’s dumber than that. I’m just on both sides of the thing, at the same time, unable to let go of either.
And there’s a question that keeps coming back, the one that hurts most. Not the easy fear of the headlines. This one: how do I pass on to them the desire to learn, the taste for effort, when a machine will always know better than they do? When the reflex becomes “ask the AI” before they’ve even tried?
I don’t have the answer. I keep reading them stories at night. It’s all I’ve found so far. But I’m afraid for their future, truly.
Which movie am I in
It’s basically this that I can’t sort out.
There are those who see us dead within fifty years. Climate, collapse, wars, the set crumbling. And there are those who promise us a hundred and fifty years of life, augmented intelligence, diseases cured, near-immortality.
No one ever asked a parent to choose between those two movies. Which way to look? Do we even have a choice?
And while we hesitate, companies in the United States are already selling a service that ranks embryos by IQ, by height, by eye color. “Optimized” babies. For those who can pay.
I don’t know which movie I’m in. But I’m starting to see who gets the lead role, and who’ll be an extra.
No conclusion
I’d like to end on a sentence that puts it all away. I can’t find one.
Part of me would like to say stop. Slow down, take the time, unplug, “drop everything and go live in the woods”. Another part is pulled into the whirlwind, fascinated, curious, happy to follow the movement. Part of me endures it. Part of me wants in.
Both at once. Every day.
So we live with the knot.
This very morning, I tell my kids that No, we’re not driving to school, because we can easily walk twenty minutes. And tonight, probably, I’ll burn some tokens for the fun of it 🐍