Compilable Wishes - Michael Edward Johnson’s Substack

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Compilable Wishes

Michael Edward Johnson<br>Aug 12, 2026

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We are now in the singularity. One of the most interesting flavors of our *specific* singularity is that language is becoming executable: LLMs can increasingly summon what we put into words.<br>Sam Altman recently suggested thinking of future ASIs as ‘genies’ capable of granting near-arbitrary wishes. If we take this metaphor seriously *and* put aside meta-wishes for controlling genies (a crucial topic but out of scope), I think four filters dominate:<br>Some wishes aren’t worthwhile; the average wish is actually pretty mid.

Some wishes don’t describe a possible state of reality; just because we can combine words into a pattern doesn’t mean it compiles to reality.

Some wishes won’t be acceptable to the genies, for reasons of e.g. resources or politics; the future is a multi-genie equilibrium.

Genies may interpret wishes in ways that make their literal fulfillment bad; the core trope around genies is malicious compliance.

This last trap is surprisingly mild in the LLM era: by building machine intelligence on top of language, we get many aspects of semantic interpretation for free. Our smartest genies increasingly have better intuitive grasp of what most of our words mean than we do. This doesn’t rule out malicious compliance, but avoiding the monkey’s paw becomes more a challenge for AI alignment than finding super-defensible pedantic wording. That said, the best wishes should still produce artifacts we can inspect & understand before we implement them; alignment may be tractable but is still not trivial.<br>My current top three picks for wishes that ASIs could & should make real:<br>Blueprints for a latch pod;

Blueprints for how to build conscious AIs;

A t-shirt with the solution to physically grounding STV & the binding problem.

Somewhat unsurprisingly this is a completely biased list of my wagers about what’s needed to get into the best timelines, downstream of the research problems I’ve spent the most time thinking about.<br>I. Latch pod

Vasocomputation is the thesis that we hold local tissue context in vascular tension. Vascular muscle can clench to cut circulation to nearby neurons & reduce their capacity to update, and can also “latch”, wherein the muscle glues itself into a contracted state. Vasocomputation suggests this chronic tension can semi-permanently collapse local tissue modes, and essentially functions as a sticky bayesian prior over what the local tissue can see and do; I propose latches as a candidate anatomical implementation of the somatic memory system described by e.g. Buddhism, Ayurveda, Wilhelm Reich, and John Sarno. I expect the body creates and dissolves latches during both ordinary life and extreme sensory events such as trauma. Most ordinary latches are temporary but some fail to release, accumulate over time, and become functionally equivalent to damage.<br>A “latch pod” would be a device that first does a full-body scan (much like the Midjourney ultrasound) to map all of someone’s vascular latches. Functionally, per vasocomputation, this would be a “map of where someone’s nervous system is not free.” Then it would infer, mechinterp-style, which of these latches are safe to open. Then, after a check-in with the user, it would open them.<br>The magnitude of the effect would depend on the courage, psychological dexterity, & physiological tone of the subject (broadly, their ‘nervous system virtue’). At the low end, this would be a “trauma release pod” — opening up degrees of freedom that bad experiences have closed, and doing garbage collection on latches in general. But it would only be safe to use on latches where the subject could competently handle regaining that particular flavor of nervous system freedom; the best approach would be savvy & allow reversible perturbation. At the high end of user capacity, this would be an “enlightenment pod” — identifying those latches pinning someone’s dynamic range in ways that prevent the phenomenological freedom associated with Classical Buddhist Enlightenment, then opening them in minutes.<br>Significance :<br>From conversations with friends I expect the “Classical Buddhist Enlightenment” state is significantly better, moment by moment, than typical human experience. Universal Basic Enlightenment is aspirational; the more general and practical observation is that everyone has old psychological wounds. A device able to programmatically revisit & revise the freedom-safety tradeoffs our bodies have made (sometimes decided in a state of panic) would be transformative for every adult’s emotional health.<br>The neuroscientific significance of a latch pod is as a test of latch construct validity. Neurotech has struggled because its constructs aren’t particularly real: alpha waves & fMRI voxels are real measurements, but their functional significance and test-retest validity is always in question....