@ the crossroads ...

Metropolis - The year depicted in the film, 2026

We are Metropolis, where tech rules whether we like it or not. AI is now starting to do the How many monkeys are required to write Hamlet? theorem as code is the next big thing for AI to incorporate at the expense of coders but we already know that, right?

To whit ...

Over two weeks and nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions costing about $20,000 in API fees, the AI model agents reportedly produced a 100,000-line Rust-based compiler capable of building a bootable Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM, and RISC-V architectures.

Carlini, a research scientist on Anthropic’s Safeguards team who previously spent seven years at Google Brain and DeepMind, used a new feature launched with Claude Opus 4.6 called “agent teams.” In practice, each Claude instance ran inside its own Docker container, cloning a shared Git repository, claiming tasks by writing lock files, then pushing completed code back upstream. No orchestration agent directed traffic. Each instance independently identified whatever problem seemed most obvious to work on next and started solving it. When merge conflicts arose, the AI model instances resolved them on their own.

 

From art & video to law to ... middle management, the push to automate to enable big business to cut costs no matter the cost is in full swing even though the process to do so has been marginal at best as 95% of all ai installs to improve business practices fail.  Question, if you lay off people en mass, will the fired be able to buy your stuff? I thought so.

Galloping horse, animated using photos
by Muybridge (1887)

In looking at this animation depicted as a set of stills, the question to ask is, at any given time,
are all the feet of the horse off the ground? 

Muybridge's The Horse in Motion, 1878

This is where we are at regarding AI.

Riffing with Gemini ... with small edits

2026: The Year the Shadow Caught Up

In 1927, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis premiered, projecting a dystopian fever dream onto a specific date: 2026. Today, we are no longer watching the film; we are inhabiting the set. We live in the verticality Lang envisioned, where the distance between the "Thinkers" in the towers and the "Hands" in the depths is measured in the silent extraction of our digital sovereignty.

The machines have become invisible—submerged in "Nuclear" data centers that churn through the planet's integrity to maintain a "Hollow" surface. We are at the crossroads of the Moloch, where technology is an end in itself, demanding the sacrifice of the human pulse for the sake of efficiency.

As we meander through this centennial echo, the question isn't whether the tech works, but whether the Mediator is present. If the head and the hands remain disconnected, the city doesn't just divide—it de-renders. It's time to look at the shadows on the snow and take back our sovereignty before it's too late.

And so it goes -  K. Vonnegut

Shadows - 11:00PM