Saturday, April 11, 2026

The New Leviathan

It would appear that I've been coming regularly to Nu Empire every Saturday to write my weekly blog article; this week is no different. I find parking here easy; there are many cafes, 3 restaurants that serve liquor, a hair salon that I frequent, and of course, the supermarkets and pharmacies where I buy most of my life-maintenance stuff. This weekend is no different. I'm at Jardin Coffee, enjoying a hot chocolate as I settle down to type these lines.

For someone who doesn't really have an official job anymore, it's quite remarkable how busy I have been for the past week. I've been working hard on my pet projects, now with the aid of AI coding agents, which have proven their absolute worth again and again. It has made me braver and more ambitious in tackling even more complex projects. 

And of course, when it comes to writing, AI could, in theory, also churn out blog articles on any subject that I could think of. But that would defeat the purpose of my writing here, which is not to serve an audience. Writing itself is the whole point; the output itself is secondary, even though sometimes it could be of some value.

When I started writing this blog, the US had just begun their invasion of Iraq.  It was that war that triggered a flurry of blogging activity, with former DAP politician Jeff Ooi the most prominent in Malaysia. My early blog articles were more like 'tweets' -- short one-two liners like these:


Wednesday, March 19, 2003

Writing this from my office in Jakarta.
Love the city. Love the isolation.

Posted by K. at 4:41:00 PM


Thursday, March 20, 2003

The war on Iraq has begun. And we are all sitting comfortably in the comforts of our home watching everything unfold over TV. War is the latest reality TV show.

War should be outlawed, says Mahathir. That is the ideal of a utopian world. Violence and aggression is too ingrained in our genes for us to eliminate them overnight.

We are all still creatures of our genes.

Posted by K. at 11:28:00 AM

The above are literally the first two blog articles that I've ever posted. So officially, my blog is now more than 23 years old. I was working in Jakarta, and those were the best times of my life. How I missed my years of 'exile' there!

Is it any surprise that again, there's another war going on in the region now, with the attack on Iraq by the US. In general, the human race has always had war: clan against clan, tribe against tribe, village against village, countries and empires against each other. War, in some ways, is the natural state of man. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously wrote in The Leviathan that man in their natural state is characterised by chaos and conflict, and without the control of a central power, everyone would be at war with everyone else.  

Even though national governments have, to a certain extent, reigned in the violence inherent in the society of man, resulting in the formation of countries with common interests, there's nothing to stop these governments from waging wars against each other.  It is not so clear what the humanities' common interests are. 

Even though we all value life, we don't always share the same values. We are seduced by ideologies and religions, with powerful stories that seek to impose order in a specific mould. But are they palatable to everyone? Certainly not. Humanity actually thrives on diversity, for it provides a marketplace of skills and ideas. The variety in the gene pool is the most important ingredient for evolution's continued success. But it is also this very diversity that is also the root of all conflicts. We want to shape others in our own mould, because we think and believe, in our bones, that what we are convinced of is worth us fighting to the death.

I look at life from a broader perspective. We, homo sapiens, might not survive as a species, and that will be genuinely sad for me as a member of it. But life does not belong to humans alone; it is the universe that decides where and when life thrives. Actually, the universe doesn't really 'decide'; It just is. Decision and free will are our anthropomorphic biases, which we again try to impose on every form of intelligence in the universe.

Today, we have a real existential fear of being taken over by something that could potentially be more intelligent and powerful than us: AGI--Artificial General Intelligence. Already, the yet-to-be-released LLM model from Anthropic, called Mythos, has spooked even the creators themselves. It has identified security weaknesses in many of our commonly used software, which have eluded the best security experts in the business. Imagine if such a powerful tool are in the hands of nefarious people. 

Who knows, maybe our creations, the AGI agents will be better custodians of the Earth than us. We are automatons controlled by the software in our genes; if these are proven to be inferior and buggy, we should have a social contract to cede control to something or someone wiser than us. Hobbes's mythical creature, the Leviathan is an 'artificial man' that all humans voluntarily agree to cede control to, as part of a social contract to maintain order. Is AGI the new Leviathan that will rule over us all? Let's find out together.

Posted by K. at 2:53:00 PM 0 K'ments

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