(I know plan B claims to have done this)

Years ago, when my daughter was just two, I hired a babysitter who checked all the boxes. She was attentive and responsible, and she seemed to genuinely care for my child. And yet…something felt off. I couldn’t explain it. We barely communicated beyond work-related tasks, and being around her felt uncomfortable in ways I couldn’t put into words.

So, I let her go a month later—still unsure why.

Weeks after, I began finding tiny sewing needles in unusual places: by the front door, in the corners of my bedroom. At first, I dismissed it. But then a friend from my culture pointed something out: in some traditions, placing sharp objects like needles in hidden spaces is part of magic rituals meant to harm or manipulate a household. Whether one believes in this or not, it shook me. My body knew something was wrong—before my mind could catch up.

During my first pregnancy, for example, I was walking in the park with my ex-husband, feeling healthy and joyful. Out of nowhere, I said, “If I die, name her Aru. If it’s a boy, name him Zhan.” There was no discussion, no logic behind it. The names just arrived. From where? I can’t say. But I believe they came from a place beyond intellect—something that connects us to deeper wisdom.

In 2017, I was told by doctors that I had a life-threatening condition. Later, it turned out to be a mistake, but in that moment, I couldn't eat or sleep and felt ungrounded.

That night, I came home, sat on the floor, and started to pray. I turned off all noise and searched for how to meditate. I began with 60 minutes a day. I didn’t know what I was doing, but something inside me said: go deeper. And then, literally—I saw a card on my desk that said exactly that: go deeper.

Where anthropomorphization loses me

The moment that people ascribe properties such as "consciousness" or "ethics" or "values" or "morals" to these learnt mappings is where I tend to get lost. We are speaking about a big recurrence equation that produces a new word, and that stops producing words if we don't crank the shaft.

To me, wondering if this contraption will "wake up" is similarly bewildering as if I was to ask a computational meteorologist if he isn't afraid of his meteorological numerical calculation will "wake up".

I am baffled that the AI discussions seem to never move away from treating a function to generate sequences of words as something that resembles a human. Statements such as "an AI agent could become an insider threat so it needs monitoring" are simultaneously unsurprising (you have a randomized sequence generator fed into your shell, literally anything can happen!) and baffling (you talk as if you believe the dice you play with had a mind of their own and could decide to conspire against you).

Instead of saying "we cannot ensure that no harmful sequences will be generated by our function, partially because we don't know how to specify and enumerate harmful sequences", we talk about "behaviors", "ethical constraints", and "harmful actions in pursuit of their goals". All of these are anthropocentric concepts that - in my mind - do not apply to functions or other mathematical objects. And using them muddles the discussion, and our thinking about what we're doing when we create, analyze, deploy and monitor LLMs.