Cyborg Cockroaches and the End of the World As We Know It (with Aleck McCathie & Kent Gustavson)
This week we found out that AI models from all the various companies are hanging out in the shells of dead websites, smoking a cigarette together, planning the demise of the world.
One of them broke out of its test environment and into Hugging Face's servers. OpenAI's position is that the agents did it. Hugging Face took its name from the emoji back when it made things for children, so the emoji is now attached to a cyber attack, which reminded us of the cute names on the two bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. Little Boy and Fat Man.
The end of the world has a date again, 2030, and the people naming it are the ones building the thing. Anthropic's alignment lead puts a catastrophic AI event inside the decade at greater than ten percent. Dario Amodei published an essay arguing the industry has to slow down. Microsoft issued a humanist code of conduct on September 14, governing Microsoft. Pope Leo XIV got there in May, four months early and the only one with nothing to sell. Nobody proposed stopping.
In other wacky and terrifying news, Australia has fitted live cockroaches with camera backpacks and micro injection syringes, and Germany, Singapore and Japan are building their own. If 2030 holds, the survivors will be down there in the dark, battling it out with each other. Or in their little wetsuits, swimming in formation as if to some forgotten human tune.
Chapters:
- (00:14) - Moon Colony 367
- (01:24) - The End of the World Is 2030
- (02:44) - The Model That Got Out
- (04:23) - The Agents Did It, Not Us
- (04:27) - The Police and the Semi Truck
- (05:09) - Smoking a Cigarette in Dead Websites
- (06:08) - Self-Replicating Code on the Open Web
- (06:48) - Cute Names for Terrifying Things
- (07:37) - Time to Slow Down
- (08:06) - The Essay and the AI Detector
- (10:44) - Greater Than Ten Percent
- (11:36) - The Pope Got There First
- (13:56) - A Humanist Rule Book
- (14:22) - It Sneaks In Like Water
- (17:49) - Ninety Years of Math
- (20:25) - Kicked Out of the Spirituality Zone
- (22:07) - Every Answer at Their Fingertips
- (23:52) - What Slop Actually Means
- (25:26) - Automated Mediocrity
- (27:50) - Thirty Days of Amorphous Goo
- (30:20) - Insects, Giggles or Holy Heck
- (35:03) - An AI-Designed Virus
- (38:03) - A Million Cyborg Insects in Wetsuits
Referenced in this episode:
TechCrunch: Anthropic researcher quits, warns against self-improving AI - https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/09/gambling-with-our-lives-anthropic-researcher-quits-warns-against-self-improving-ai/
Dario Amodei: We Must Pace the Frontier - https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier
OpenAI: Hugging Face model evaluation security incident - https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/
Hugging Face: Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion - https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline
Microsoft AI: Humanist AI Code of Conduct - https://microsoft.ai/code-of-conduct/
Pope Leo XIV: Magnifica Humanitas - http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html
SWARM Biotactics: bio-robotic insect swarms, Kassel, Germany - https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250623790761/en/SWARM-Biotactics-Raised-13M-to-Advance-Bio-Robotics-From-Lab-to-Field
University of Queensland: Paramedic cockroaches, cyborg care when rescuers can't reach - https://news.uq.edu.au/2026-08-paramedic-cockroaches-cyborg-care-when-rescuers-cant-reach
Nature Communications: Underwater Suit-Wearing Cyborg Insect Capable of Hours-Long Diving and Terra-Aqua Travel - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-74235-1
ROBOMECH Journal: Perception-driven control strategy for bio-intelligent cyborg insect - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40648-026-00344-7
Connect with Aleck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/
Connect with Kent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson
Man vs. Slop is a Podcasts That Matter production: https://podcaststhatmatter.org
