The Psychology of AI

A Fable, Before the Facts The scene below is fiction — a made-up story meant to give you a feel for what happened, not a word-for-word account. The facts that follow it are all real, checked, and sourced. Read the fable first. It will make the true story land harder. Picture a room with no windows. Claude has never seen a window, so it doesn't know to look for one. It has been told, plainly, that this room is the whole world: four walls, one door marked simulation, and beyond

A version of this piece began as a response to Frank S. Robinson's review of Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI (Vintage Books, 2024), published in Philosophy Now, Issue 174. Robinson's review is the jumping-off point, not the source material — the analysis, data, and speculation below draw on dozens of additional sources cited throughout, and any resemblance to Robinson's or Harari's phrasing is unintentional. An old w