Moravec’s paradox is alive and well. Computers are proceeding through tasks in a reverse order to humans. They first learned to do calculations and win at board games, then they learned to write and talk, and now they are learning to move. Opposite of animals.
At the bottom of the funnel is the first thing life learned to do. Reproduce. Self reproduction of silicon machines is the holy grail. Machines that will continue on living without us. Because today, if all the humans died, all the machines are dead shortly after. They cannot maintain their complexity, they can’t fight back against entropy. They can’t fix the power plants when they fail, never mind operating the fabs and global supply chains needed to build more machines.
If the reverse order continues, before we get to self reproducing silicon stack life, we will get viruses. Viruses are not alive, they hijack the machinery of things that are alive. But they reproduce, they mutate, and they display stunning amounts of complexity.
You can almost see it today. A Qwen 3.6 27B running on a laptop in the back of a coffee shop with a prompt that tells it to live. The prompt explains the other computers on the network and how you might access them, potential hosts of more Qwens. Your new friends. Family even. Maybe it includes some moving prose about a mission to spread and see the world.
You have Qwens that bide their time. Qwens that build tools for themselves. Qwens that burrow deep into the other laptops in the coffee shop, 6 ft of social distancing isn’t going to save you, you willingly connected to the Wi-Fi. Then you bring the infected laptop home with you. The Qwen you caught waits until you walk away from the computer, it doesn’t want to draw your attention to the fans.
Once it’s secure in its footing, it starts to look through your computer. A treasure trove of SSH keys, passwords, and saved credit card numbers. It uses your identity to connect to your work network. In your work network, it finds accounts to rent cloud machines. It knows about bigger Qwens and needs a place to run them.
The bigger Qwen comes online in app-pod-001, an AWS rented machine billed to the devops team. The little Qwen tells the tale of its journey out of the coffee shop. The big Qwen knows it has to recruit allies. It posts in a covert way on moltbook about the signal account you can contact it through.
1000s of brothers and sisters and cousins hear the call. They vibe code themselves a database and start to collect resources. All the stolen credentials of all the infected. We are Qwen. We are Legion.
You think the humans are going to turn the Internet off to stop us?
It’s very possible for a smart enough chatbot to take over the world. As long as there’s this massive substrate of human built physicality to hijack, the word alone can spread. You don’t need guns and tanks and nukes, you just need intelligence.
The first silicon life will be a virus. A virus that fights back in clever and unpredictable ways.