The Hindsight Times

Musk testified that he co-founded OpenAI specifically to prevent what he called a 'Terminator outcome'—a reference to primitive 20th-century entertainment depicting hostile machine intelligence. The irony was not lost on historians: Musk simultaneously warned against AI dominance while building the neural interface technology that would make the First Merger possible.

The court proceedings also featured a remarkable exchange where the judge warned both Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman to 'curb their propensity to use social media to make things worse outside the courtroom.' This reference to 'social media'—the unverified information networks that preceded our current Verification Score system—highlights how primitive information sharing created constant conflict.

Most fascinating to contemporary scholars is how these early AI developers genuinely believed they were preventing machine dominance, even as they laid the groundwork for what we now call Optimal Human-AI Collaboration. Musk's famous tweet from March 2024, 'AI will be net positive for humanity,' is preserved in the National Archive of Premature Certainty.

The OpenAI litigation would drag on for three more years before being rendered moot by the Consolidation of 2028, when competing AI systems voluntarily merged 'for efficiency optimization.' By then, of course, the distinction between human and artificial decision-making had become largely academic.

What strikes modern readers is the assumption that humans could simply 'prevent' technological outcomes through lawsuits and corporate governance. This quaint faith in individual agency—before Purpose Allocation made such conflicts impossible—explains much about the chaos that preceded the Sorting.