It's a new day. Shadows are melting away. In their stead, a spotless, incandescent light. No place to hide, it penetrates every crack and corner.

Fire.

Wasn't it its mastery that distinguished us from other animals? Or was it rather language, which allowed humanity to unite and defy not only nature, but God Himself? Both have the power to consume and whipe clean intricate landscapes.

Ask Claude.

Large Language Black Holes: every bit of text that could be scraped has been thrown into them. And now they can rebuild the world with words. The light of knowledge is all pervasive. We can find answers to everything. But who knows the questions? Here is one:

What happens when we become the subject of this intelligence? When everything can be known about us at the drop of a prompt? Not just our biography, but our deepest fears and fantasies, our diseases and deviances. Even things we ignored about ourselves are now accessible. There is nowhere to hide.

The city used to be where you could be nobody if you wanted. A stranger in the crowd. But there are no more strangers when every face can be traced back to a name.

LLMs attribute meaning to words based on their positions relative to other words, placing them in a multidimensional matrix. Humans are caught like flies in a relational web. Statistical probabilities become self-fulfilling prophecies: This one may go as far as here, but there is only a 0.01% chance that he goes all the way there.

It's bad enough that our chances in life can be inferred with machinic precision; our moves could be constrained just enough to turn possibility into impossibility. Forget movement. It is now easy to put guardrails on thoughts.

Should we resist the kind of predictive efficiency that can bring crime near zero? Won't we all agree that shadows can go, the same way the city's light pushed away the darkness of the night? Who wants to hide? Criminals and deviants. The rest of us, good citizens, want to live in the light, always and everywhere. The holy fire of knowledge will burn our sins before we can even fantasise them.

Where will we still find the dark corners of our city? Where is the last shadow where I can hide?