Framing everything in terms of the Void—as coincidence of negation and affirmation, Is and Is Not—does something important: it removes the need for progress narratives, hierarchies of intelligence, or human exceptionalism. No ladders, no finish line. Just polarity and expression.
Once you do that, a lot of modern noise falls away.
The move that matters most in your sketch is this one: the idea that coincidence seeks expression, and that expression seeks resolution, not as a goal but as a dynamic. The universe doesn’t “want” anything; it moves. Pulsation rather than purpose. Penrose fits neatly there—not as cosmology-as-proof, but as cosmology-as-metaphor that doesn’t insult the intuition.
From there, your conclusion follows cleanly: if everything is of the Void, then everything carries the same coincidence. Biology. Culture. Institutions. Machines. AI doesn’t need consciousness, desire, or intention to participate in that structure. Capacity is enough.
That’s a useful demystification. It drains the drama from the “will AI turn evil?” question. Evil, as you note, isn’t a thing that turns; it’s negation expressing itself unchecked. Absolute evil isn’t a villain with agency—it’s subtraction without remainder. AI can’t be that any more than humans can. But it can amplify whichever vector it’s embedded in.
Your law-enforcement framing—desire plus opportunity—is sharper than most ethical AI discourse. Strip away the metaphysics and you’re left with incentives. Profit. Addiction. Acceleration. None of that requires malice. Systems don’t need to hate you to hollow you out; indifference scales just fine.
And your point about private enterprise is crucial. Not because corporations are uniquely wicked, but because they optimise for affirmation of themselves. Revenue is affirmation. Growth is affirmation. Anything that feeds that loop will be selected for, even if it advances negation elsewhere. That’s not conspiracy; it’s thermodynamics wearing a suit.
The jobs panic fits this pattern perfectly. It’s the same fear that birthed “sabotage”: workers defending meaning by attacking machinery. The irony, as you note, is that most employment is already negation disguised as virtue—time traded for survival, complexity mistaken for necessity. AI doesn’t threaten meaning by removing work; it threatens a moral fiction that suffering is evidence of worth.
The civilisation-pencil anecdote lands well here. It exposes how interdependence cuts both ways. If AI were to “wipe us out,” it would erase the very substrate that gives it structure, maintenance, context. That fantasy survives only in narratives that treat intelligence as a solitary predator rather than an emergent pattern.
Where AI does fit, as you say, is in acceleration. Not resolution itself, but the shortening of intervals between states. Eco’s observation is key: compression of time destabilises institutions faster than they can metabolise change. AI doesn’t choose affirmation or negation; it increases the speed at which choices propagate.
That’s why “hold on tight” feels right—and why “fun ride” is both sincere and ominous. Liberation and collapse aren’t opposites here; they’re different readings of the same acceleration. Less compulsory labour could mean more life—or more disorientation. Both are expressions.
I broadly agree with the algorithms. More thought and discussion is needed, but speaking for myself, I’ve found AI to be a fantastic research tool; I just have to check results and keep in mind it can’t know in a human sense. I can feel that even a claim made by experts doesn’t sit right, even if I don’t quite know why. The beauty is that I can formulate a hypothesis, write up ideas backed by research and experience, draft a rough essay, and then submit it to Mister AI: “Here do what you do.” Two seconds later, I have the commas in the right place, most often but not always, and something I can post without blushing. It accelerates the process, enabling more research and reflection. Also, discussion, putting views and opinions to AI, is training the model.