# Animal Objects

> Essays by Brandon Wilson about artificial intelligence, culture, animal behavior, history, technology, and human nature.

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## Essays

- [The Leverage Theory of History](https://animalobjects.com/essays/the-leverage-theory-of-history.md): What really drives history? Updated 2026-05-14.
- [2026 AI Predictions](https://animalobjects.com/essays/2026-ai-predictions.md): A galaxy brain forecast for the ages Updated 2026-05-17.
- [Schleppy AGI](https://animalobjects.com/essays/schleppy-agi.md): Why powerful AI might arrive sooner than we think Updated 2026-05-14.
- [On Randomness](https://animalobjects.com/essays/on-randomness.md): Is the universe, at bottom, random? Updated 2025-12-03.
- [Who Controls the Robot Army?](https://animalobjects.com/essays/engines-of-arbitrary-power-who-controls-the-robot-army.md): The American founders feared standing armies Updated 2025-10-29.
- [How To Forecast AGI](https://animalobjects.com/essays/why-andrej-karpathy-is-probably-wrong-about-agi.md): Compute, not intuition, should guide AGI timelines Updated 2025-10-18.
- [Are Language Models Human Emulations?](https://animalobjects.com/essays/are-language-models-human-emulations.md): What blackmail behaviors reveal about the nature of LLMs Updated 2026-05-14.
- [Sam Altman at TED: A Takeaway I Keep Coming Back to](https://animalobjects.com/essays/the-subtext-you-are-a-member-of-colony.md): Why no one is steering this ship Updated 2026-05-14.
- [AI Risk and the Banality of Evil](https://animalobjects.com/essays/open-weights-and-unhackable-morality.md): We need safety designs that assume full access to model weights Updated 2026-06-29.
- [‘Vibe Coding’ Signals the End of Software Programmers](https://animalobjects.com/essays/vibe-coding-signals-the-end-of-software-programmers-2.md): Synergy or substitute? Updated 2026-05-17.
- [When Machines Compete](https://animalobjects.com/essays/when-machines-compete.md): The Darwinian shift reshaping capitalism Updated 2026-05-24.
- [OpenAI’s Charter](https://animalobjects.com/essays/openais-charter.md): You may be surprised at their stance on the AGI arms race Updated 2026-05-17.
- [The Product Lifecycle of Human Labor](https://animalobjects.com/essays/the-product-lifecycle-of-human-labor.md): Will humans become an idle resource? Updated 2025-01-18.
- [2025 AI Predictions](https://animalobjects.com/essays/2025-predictions.md): Overall, I think 2025 will be the year the zeitgeist shifts Updated 2026-05-17.
- [Consumption Must Flow](https://animalobjects.com/essays/consumption-must-flow.md): The fallout from AI’s collision with the labor force Updated 2026-05-14.
- [What is a Computer?](https://animalobjects.com/essays/the-translation-machine.md): Thoughts on the computer on the eve of AGI Updated 2026-05-23.
- [A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence](https://animalobjects.com/essays/a-brief-history-of-artificial-intelligence.md): A meditation on the culmination of the computer revolution Updated 2026-07-26.
- [The Origin of the Attention Mechanism in LLMs](https://animalobjects.com/essays/the-origin-story-of-transformers.md): Dzmitry Bahdanau explains how he arrived at the idea Updated 2026-05-17.
- [The Big Opportunity in AI: Legacy Industry](https://animalobjects.com/essays/the-big-opportunity-in-ai.md): The entire economy is going to be remade Updated 2024-11-28.
- [The Singularity and its Discontents](https://animalobjects.com/essays/the-void.md): Will spaceships and Dyson spheres make us happy? Updated 2026-05-14.
- [The Real Risk of AGI: Geopolitical Disequilibria](https://animalobjects.com/essays/the-game-theory-of-agi.md): Ultimately, the risks of AGI are not technical but human Updated 2026-05-17.
- [Hollywood in a Laptop](https://animalobjects.com/essays/hollywood-in-a-laptop.md): What happens if anyone can make a blockbuster? Updated 2026-05-24.
- [The Twilight of Labor](https://animalobjects.com/essays/the-twilight-of-labor.md): Technology and the human ego Updated 2026-05-15.