The Freight Train - by Marcello Delcaro

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The Freight Train<br>Fable 5 is where the cons start outweighing the pros

Marcello Delcaro<br>Jun 11, 2026

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It is late. I watched another Center for Humane Technology piece, then went straight into Bloomberg’s deep dive on Anthropic, and this is what came out. Take it in that spirit.<br>I am starting to see a trend emerging that has me deeply concerned about our trajectory. It has me pondering the long tail of exponentials, the cycles societies move through, public perception, and how my own brain has tried to comprehend this insane and seemingly never ending ride we have found ourselves on with AI.<br>What fascinates me most is the cognitive dissonance that must be happening inside the heads of the staff at these large scale AI firms. They can believe one thing to be true, hold genuine concern for humanity, and then wake up the next day and do the thing that has them concerned. How does that work? What does that look like in their minds? What allows a person to say “well, we are doing it the right way” while fundamentally understanding that they lack the technology to see what is happening inside these models, or what they are fully capable of?<br>I believe Fable 5 is showing us that we are on a freight train starting to come off the rails. Opus 4.8 got close enough to all the pros with minimal cons. Now the law of diminishing gains is kicking in, and the cons are starting to outweigh the pros. This is a very slippery slope. So slippery that we as a species have come together before to create global agreements about technologies that could do as much damage, if not less, than what these models are capable of today. Not what they are going to be capable of. What they are capable of right now.<br>Which is why the harness, when something gets too close to the edge, simply cuts off the conversation or diverts it to a model without the capability of causing harm. That is not good. That is an admission. “We don’t know how to control this thing, but here it is anyways.” And it has been like this for the past 12 months.<br>It is very unfortunate, because I have found true fulfillment in the middle of all this. Seeing a project finished end to end in weeks instead of months or years did that. But I do not think our minds were built to withstand the whiplash these tools cause. I find myself dependent on them now. Not because my knowledge is slipping, but because I have grown accustomed to shipping with such speed that going back to writing code by hand would frustrate me to no end.<br>The makers of the tools tell us they do not want to make them but feel a duty to do so. They are signalling to the rest of the world that they are the true defenders of humanity, even though they themselves are the perpetrators. And the argument is always the same: “our enemies will build it and use it against us if we don’t.” That is a large assumption, and actually quite an ignorant one. I hate the word enemies anyway (it is such a weak and minimized version of the truth; they are humans with families and shit at the end of the day). The only reason our “enemies” have caught up to the west in technological innovation is that they notoriously steal trade secrets, reverse engineer what they steal, and use their large scale labour forces to make the thing for cheap. Which we then buy from them. It is so absurd it makes no sense to me.<br>So, to summarize: we are trapped in a lockstep of mutually assured destruction, because we created the perfect storm. We needed better tools, so we built better tools. We came to rely on the better tools, so we used them to build even better tools. And so on, and so on. I think we are about to walk off a cliff.<br>But man, am I able to ship FAST.<br>🚄 Good night.

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