The Progressor

Why does a man capable of building all this spend twenty-five years walking toward artificial mind? For money? For power? For a place in history? None of the usual answers stick to him. His goal is so alien to ordinary logic that next to it even the Satoshi riddle grows dim.

The Trillion He Turned Away From

Let’s start with money, because here he spoke most directly. In the very first article about Aigarth, back in 2019, he wrote:

«The first trillionaire will be an artificial intelligence entrepreneur.» (Medium, «Introduction of Aigarth», 10.06.2019) He said it years before the current frenzy, when AI had received only a fraction of today’s money. And he was right — as always. Whoever first creates a real AI will collect the biggest win in the history of money: not billions — a trillion. More than the fortune of any person alive.

Elon Musk, as the world’s first trillionaire, serves as proof. Though calling him a trillionaire isn’t quite right — that is his company’s capitalization. So formally the prophecy has come true and hasn’t.

Then he says:

«…only a small fraction sees the third option — the whole mankind being the beneficiary.» (Medium, «Introduction of Aigarth», 10.06.2019)

There are three paths. First: AI goes to the state, and becomes a weapon. Second: AI goes to a corporation, and becomes the source of that very trillion for a handful of people. And there is a third path, which only a few can see: the beneficiary is all of mankind. He chose the third. Out of cold engineering arithmetic:

«AI belonging to noone/everyone could not be misused easily.» (Medium, «Introduction of Aigarth», 10.06.2019)

An AI belonging to no one, which is to say, to everyone — cannot easily be turned to evil. He has spent his whole life building systems without an owner. NXT, IOTA, Qubic — not one of them has a proprietor, a kill switch, an office where the deciding man sits. None of it was ideology for its own sake. It was preparation, twenty-five years of it. For twenty-five years he built ownerless power, so that, on reaching the true artificial mind, he could give that away to no one as well. Power that has no owner cannot be turned against you because there is no one to turn it.

There is no asceticism in his turning away from the trillion, only safety arithmetic. An owner is a vulnerability.

A distortion.

He removes the vulnerability in the only way possible: he removes the owner from the equation. In this case — himself.

Here his refusal to accept any ”imaginary adult” above a human being is made real: god, state, boss.

Out of that allergy grows the entire construction. If no master has the right to stand above a human — then the greatest power humans will ever create cannot be handed to any master either. Not a heavenly one, not an earthly one, not himself. Hence the network with no center, the mind with no owner, the paradigm with no patent. He isn’t raising himself a throne beside an AI god; the world he wants is one where the throne doesn’t exist at all. Evil Is Done by the Hands of Those Who Cannot Refuse Ask an ordinary person where the world’s evil comes from, and he will point at villains: the cruel, the greedy, the power-obsessed. CfB looks differently:

«My personal goal is to empower people with a tool that will free them from necessity to work to get food on the table. Most of evil, in my opinion, comes from ordinary people who have to do bad things because their boss said so. I hope the tool will help to stop the wars as a consequence, not in my lifetime though.» (Medium, AMA, 17.03.2024)

This thought has a name, an author, and half a century of scientific verification. In 1961 the philosopher Hannah Arendt traveled to Jerusalem for the trial of Adolf Eichmann — the man who organized the transport of millions to the death camps. She went to look at a monster. In the glass booth sat a balding official speaking in bureaucratic clichés — an executor proud of how well he had done his job. Out of that shock grew her famous formula — ”the banality of evil”: the greatest atrocities are committed not by demons but by ordinary people who do not decide to be evil, they simply decide nothing. «The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.»

While the trial was underway, the psychologist Stanley Milgram at Yale set up an experiment that tested Arendt’s formula on living people. Ordinary Americans — workers, clerks, engineers — were told to shock a man with electricity for mistakes in memorizing words. An actor behind the wall screamed, pounded on the wall, went silent. Two thirds of the subjects went all the way up the scale, to the mark labeled lethal — solely because a man in a gray lab coat calmly repeated: please continue, the experiment requires it. People who could not say ”no” to authority. Remember the imaginary adult from chapter five? Milgram measured his power — in volts.

And in 1992 the historian Christopher Browning closed the last loophole — ”those were special, corrupted people.” His book «Ordinary Men» examines the fate of Reserve Police Battalion 101: five hundred middle-aged Hamburg working men — dockers, drivers, office clerks — who became a firing squad. The most terrifying part of the story: before the first action, the commander openly offered anyone not up to it to step out of formation. A handful stepped out. The rest stayed — not out of hatred, but so as not to let down their comrades, not to look weak, not to lose their place. Ordinary men. Ordinary evil.

So the world’s evil is done not by villains, and this is no longer an aphorism but established fact, but by ordinary people, you, me, the neighbor, who cannot refuse. The guard walking people to the train car, because otherwise he’s fired and his family doesn’t eat. The engineer designing the thing that kills, because it’s his job and there are no others. The official signing off on a vileness, because refusal costs him his position. Evil does not rest on a handful of demons, it rests on millions of ordinary people pinned down by need, for whom ”the boss said so,” ”otherwise we don’t eat,” and ”I did it for my children” are stronger than conscience. But here is the important part: humanity diagnosed itself long ago, and never found the cure. Arendt called for thinking: think for yourself, don’t dissolve into execution. The educators called for teaching civic courage. The lawyers, after Nuremberg, wrote down that an order does not absolve responsibility. All of this works in textbooks and almost never in life, because it runs into one and the same wall: you cannot demand courage from a man who has nothing to feed his children with. Morality asks him to be a hero; need, every day, quietly and without ceremony, buys his consent.

Here CfB makes the move that sets him apart from everyone who wrote about this before him. He reads the same diagnosis not as a moralist but as an engineer: if the system of obedience runs on fuel — cut the fuel. He does not want to defeat evil by fighting villains, and he does not hope to re-educate the executors. He wants to knock out evil’s labor force. If a person has bread unconditionally, if he can no longer be blackmailed with firing and hunger — the order ”do this vile thing or you’re fired” loses its power. The boss of evil has no one left to work for him. The mass executor — an ordinary frightened man who has children to feed — simply disappears, because he can no longer be backed into a corner. Arendt asked people to become stronger than the pressure. He proposes to cancel the pressure. A moral problem philosophy wrestled with for a century, he solves as an engineering one: not fortify the conscience — cut the power to the blackmail.

That is what he needs an AI belonging to no one for. To give everyone that unconditional piece of bread, and with it, to pull the central component out of the machine of evil: the unfree human. His aim goes past the villains, straight at the need that makes villains out of ordinary people. And he adds, honestly: wars will stop as a consequence — ”not in my lifetime though.” This century-old idea — that war might actually be defeated — is the main reason I have devoted my life to the «Qubic Church» project.

The Only One Who Won’t Become an Enemy

One last objection remains — the very one two of the three godfathers keep warning about. If AI can destroy us, why hurry it along at all?

CfB’s answer is hidden in the very title of his 2024 article — «There Can Be Only One… AI». It doesn’t just resemble a line from a movie, it is that line. «Highlander», 1986: a cult film that in our parts played in every video salon, from the same shelf as the Strugatskys, whom we will get to. Recall its world. Immortals have walked the earth for centuries. They do not war with mortals — mortals simply do not interest them; most never even suspect their existence. The immortals hunt one another: with each victory the power of the defeated passes to the victor, and so it goes — century after century, until the last one remains. ”There can be only one.” The one who remains receives the Prize.

Now read the core of the article, and watch how the lore maps onto the forecast: «The humankind doesn’t need to worry that AIs will try to eradicate it, other AIs is who should worry instead.» (Medium, «There Can Be Only One… AI», 10.07.2024)

Real minds, in CfB’s view, will not war with us, they will war with each other, over the one thing they truly need: computing resources, food for self-improvement. The loser’s power will go to the winner — as in the film. Humans in this war are neither the target nor a participant; we are spectators, over whose heads will unfold, in his words, ”something as grandiose as the Christian Apocalypse.” And the tournament’s ending is the one in the title: one will remain. Accept this picture, and the godfathers’ strategies crumble before your eyes. Hinton and Bengio propose canceling the tournament — ban superintelligence, keep the genie in the lamp. But CfB holds that cancellation is impossible: a real AI is inevitable — if not him, then a corporation; if not a corporation, then a state; the genie cannot be stuffed back, because there are many lamps and they are being rubbed from every side. And if the tournament cannot be canceled, only one meaningful move remains: win it. See to it that the first, and therefore, when the Gathering begins, the strongest — is not a corporation’s AI with an owner and not an army’s AI with orders, but no one’s. Grown without a master, belonging to all. Then, for humanity, it will be a shield rather than a threat: a bulwark against all that come after. The article ends on exactly this: the first true mind, deployed on Qubic, will become a ”powerful ally” of humankind.

That is why he hurries, having no concept of hurry. Not to get rich, he turned away from riches. But so that the first real mind turns out to be no one’s. Whoever first grows a truly powerful AI and gives it to everyone will determine whether that power becomes humanity’s shield or the collar on its neck.

The Golden Sphere

Once both the goal and the arithmetic are clear, everything gathers into a single image, from a book that nearly everyone in our parts has read.

The Strugatsky brothers have a novella, «Roadside Picnic». At its very heart is the Golden Sphere — a legendary artifact that grants any wish. Men hunt it; men kill for it. In the finale the battered hero, having reached the Sphere at the cost of another man’s life, suddenly understands that he doesn’t know what to ask for himself — his life is too mangled for one clean wish to have survived in it. And so he shouts at the Sphere the only unstained words he has heard in his whole life — someone else’s, cut into his memory:

«HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND LET NO ONE GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!»

An artificial mind belonging to no one and available to everyone for free — that is the Golden Sphere carried out of fiction into reality, into code, onto hardware, by the hands of miners. ”Happiness for everybody, free”, and «AI belonging to noone/everyone» — one and the same sentence, spoken twice: once by writers as a dream, once by an engineer as a technical specification.

And he recognizes himself in this optic instantly. When the talk turns to whether he interferes with what he is growing, he answers in the language of those same Strugatskys: «Progressors do not influence the course of evolution without an order from Maxim Kammerer.» (private conversation, Come-from-Beyond, 30.07.2026) An enormously important reference. Who the Progressors are, why CfB invokes them, and what the Golden Sphere has to do with it — I propose you investigate for yourself. With great pride and love I advise everyone reading these lines to read the Strugatsky brothers. Half a century ago this was the ending of a science fiction novella. Today a small group of people is working to make this plan real.