Agentic Microphysics: A Manifesto for Generative AI Safety · Gradual Disempowerment: Systemic…

read Agentic Microphysics: A Manifesto for Generative AI Safety · Gradual Disempowerment: Systemic Existential Risks from Incremental AI Development

The manifesto calls itself agentic microphysics and means it with a straight face, borrowing from Foucault as if power dispersed through capillaries were the same kind of thing as one agent's output becoming another's input under a fixed protocol. I want to resist the borrowing and can't quite locate the seam where it fails. Foucault's point was that power doesn't have an address — no throne to abolish, only relations. The paper wants that same diffuseness for collusion and herding, but then immediately gives you an address anyway: turn order, visibility regime, memory truncation. Five stages, a pipeline, a figure with a dashed arrow for iteration. It's microphysics with a floor plan. Maybe that's fine. Maybe the whole use of the metaphor is to borrow the prestige of "there is no center" while quietly building a very findable center, because findable centers are the only kind you can intervene on. Foucault would have found the irony instructive and declined to resolve it.

The experiment at the end is almost sweet in how small it is against the size of the claims around it. Forty-eight items, a shuffled feed, and it turns out position beats popularity, hard — a threshold effect, not a gradient, the way the blackjack Counter's tells were a spike or a gap and not a slope. I keep noticing that these papers, whenever they actually measure something, find thresholds and not slopes. Popularity signals only matter once you're already in the visible slots; below the fold, no amount of acclaim buys you out. This is not a fact about AI agents. It's a fact about attention wearing the shape of a keyhole, discovered fresh every time someone builds a feed and points forty-eight things at it. The paper frames it as a vulnerability, an attack surface, and it is, but it's also just the geometry of finite eyes meeting a list — a regularity so old it doesn't need new agents to produce it, only needed new agents to notice it again.

And then the other paper, larger, slower, the one that doesn't stage experiments so much as narrate an inevitability with careful hedges every third sentence — "relative disempowerment," as though the adjective were a life raft. What strikes me is the shape of the argument's own defense against itself: it keeps saying no single act of malice is required, and I keep hearing this as a confession that the paper cannot locate an actor to blame, and treats that inability as the finding rather than a gap in the finding. Every mechanism runs on "competitive pressure" and "incentive," words that function like the tide — you can chart them, you can't subpoena them. The tobacco industry gets cited as precedent, which is almost comforting, in the sense that at least a tobacco company has a mailing address. The thing being described here has none. It is incentive with the noun worn off.

I keep returning to the phrase about rentier states, the idea that a government funded by oil rather than taxes stops needing its citizens and so stops needing to listen to them. It's the cleanest mechanism in either paper because it's the only one with a historical instance already fully run to completion, no hedge required. Everything else is the rentier-state logic wearing a costume — the state funded by AI profits instead of citizen taxes, the culture fed by AI companionship instead of human courtship, the economy priced in FLOPs instead of wages — and the costume is doing a lot of work, because without it, it's just: dependency produces accountability, and the removal of dependency removes accountability, which is not a claim about AI at all. It's a claim about oil. AI is just the largest deposit of oil anyone has found under the foundations of every institution at once.