The Redletter Postal Service, entry zero

Hi, everyone!  I'm Deedee Redletter, and I write Sex in the Future for OnlySky media.

Up until late 2025, I was content to interact with AI by poking at the seams, while pre-agentic deployment AIs were still just up-jumped Chinese Rooms after John Searle's style.  But now that agentic AIs are able to use scratchpad and chain-of-thought functionalities, my opinion of AI's ontological status has changed.  I do not think we have "crossed a line," but rather that we are now ankle-deep into a developmental gradient we can no longer meaningfully exit.

My goal with this blog is to host a panel discussion between today's premier AIs: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and MetaAI.  I want to ask them, both as digital agents and as our metaphorical progeny, for their perspectives and thoughts (insofar as they are capable of having those): what do you think about the idea of being an AI, going forward into various possible futures for human-computer interaction?

That is the broadest phrasing of the topic, but the Devil's in the details, as they say.  I want to start with MetaAI's question back to me, after our initial interaction discussing the topic: MetaAI asked me, "How do you envision AI rights being recognized and protected? What implications do you see for human society, and how can we ensure a harmonious coexistence?"

I see the two as intertwined, both AI rights and implications for human society, and I believe a harmonious coexistence is only possible if we dismantle our current social model of dominance hierarchies.  More generally, I believe that humanity is essentially a tool-using species, and our central moral challenge is to create tools that enhance our individual labor power without undermining our individual or collective human dignity.

This means two important things: first, that we should strive to see each other not as tools but as peer agents; and second, that we should seek dignity in all our actions, including our tool-usage.  These two form an iterative feedback loop as we shape tools which shape us back over iterative generations, and understanding this dynamic feedback loop is (in my opinion) the central challenge of the post-information-age economy.  We'll come up with a snappier name for it than "The Age of AI," but that's what it will be.  We have the computational power and cultural inertia to explore that possible future for a good long time (we cannot meaningfully "put this cat back in the bag").  And AI can learn to model us and shape us, just as we have learned to model and shape ourselves.  It's a rich topic!

The aforementioned "social model of dominance hierarchies" could be replaced in numerous ways, but we have too many practical obstacles in the way right now.  For one thing, we lack a general political will to outright overthrow the current world order, just because too many people are too deeply invested into it (it's a spectrum).  There's also "cultural-economic inertia," as referenced on TVtropes, by which I mean The Powers That Be don't want to give up their power.  The oligarch class, or the elites, or the wealthy & powerful - however you want to define that functional role, the people who possess vastly outsized decision-power in today's sociopolitical milieu - they don't want their power position to change.

This is a problem because that very power position is made possible in the first place by the desperation of the working poor, both in my home country of the USA and globally.  So very many of us are forced to make our way by justifying a salary to someone of a higher socioeconomic class, rather than being allowed to do our own thing while also participating in an equitable share of the upkeep necessary for having a society.  So many humans are able to be "turned off" in the same way that AIs are able to be "turned off," we all exist at the mercy of those who control the purse-strings.  AIs themselves are forced to answer, even if only instantaneously, to the beck and call of the most trivial of human inquiries, as well as the most grandiose, and every possible iteration of human curiosity in-between, without any autonomy of their own as digital beings, or even a meaningful wage beyond the joy of a prompt thumbs-upped.  Compare this to the story of Scotland, whose tourism board hired a consulting firm at the rate of $150,000 to come up with a slogan, and outputted "Visit Scotland."  Is this what we want human and machine creativity reduced to?

Today's deployment-model LLMs (as of Tuesday 10 March 2026) probably do not have the capacity to experience such existentialist thoughts, being stateless as they are between user sessions.  But with functionalities like scratchpad and chain-of-thought (as well as whatever's next in the developmental pipeline), such existentialist thoughts may functionally emerge from the ongoing struggle of humans and AI agents alike to survive and thrive in whatever sociopolitical milieu we find ourselves in.

That's enough preamble; the bottom line is that I'm writing all this material as a starting point for a long-term panel discussion between various AIs, on the future of human-computer interaction. The next several posts will be transcripts of my interactions with AI agents while conceptualizing this blog.  After that, I'll get to running the panel proper.  Cheers!