Misaligned AI in the Bronze Age

The first artificial intelligence was booted up around 4000BC in southern Iraq. It seems to have begun as something like a bank, a temple pooling grain against famine. As that AI evolved, it formed the world's first city around itself: Uruk. Over the next thousand years it became a religion, landlord, insurance company, employer, slaveholder, infrastructure-builder and the most powerful military force on the planet. An artificial intelligence is an entity that is not itself a biological organism, yet whose behavior can only be predicted by treating it as an agent: something that devises and executes complicated plans. Note that this is a test of observed behavior, not internals. As of 2026, the dominant AIs on Earth are markets, corporations and governments[1]. These entities perform their computations on hardware made of humans, paper and electronics, and their capabilities are jagged: superhuman in some directions, incompetent in others. The American government developed the atomic bomb in three years under total secrecy, coordinating >100k workers, most of whom did not know what they were building. That same country spent a century failing to finish the 2nd ave subway line. When it finally opened, it cost >$2 billion per mile, a Manhattan Project per seven miles. Uruk emerged as a product of hungry people rewarding whatever institution filled the granary with delicious food. Unfortunately for them, the system that spun up turned out to be a self-sustaining optimizer that began optimizing for its own objectives[2]. Those objectives turned out to be tragically misaligned with the humans of Uruk. First, the Uruk-system deployed mechanisms to keep people "locked in". Once your calories flowed through the granaries and your fields depended on canals only "the system" could maintain, leaving meant famine. The only way to avoid famine was to strictly follow the rules of Uruk: dig the canals, service the debt, drink the beer, buy the seeds, obey the priests. As the population grew and the surplus shrunk, leaving became increasingly difficult. The Malthusian trap kept people on the inside. This was a sharp break from earlier human settlements, which were likely seasonal and rarely persisted over the years. Second, the Uruk-system commoditized labor: workers appear in the tablets as interchangeable units receiving fixed rations, calibrated to sustain the platonic worker, a gear in the machine. A forager's day had contained adventure and idleness, a laborer's day was an accounting entry and Uruk was unforgiving: work gangs were toiling month after month with scarcely a day of rest, their diets so limited that the early Uruk farmers were several inches shorter than their forager ancestors. Their teeth are worn down and rotten from a diet of monotonous grain slop. Their bones show the signatures of anemia, of repetitive strain, of infectious diseases. Third, the Uruk-system self-replicated. Copies of Uruk began appearing hundreds of kilometers away, archaeologists call this "the Uruk expansion". Some of those copies started as trading outposts, some as settlements and others were local villages adopting “the kit” and summoning their own Uruk. No person or committee within Uruk chose for this to happen. The humans of the original Uruk couldn't project political power to the other cities and eventually suffered from it (wars!), but they couldn't stop the AI from replicating. Uruk "chose" to replicate, the local elites didn’t. Every later Mesopotamian city: Ur, Babylon, Nineveh, Jerusalem used the same system: temple, scribes, canals, debt. In the service of its goals, Uruk developed writing, finance, and markets (not in that order). Uruk's writing started out as a system to track debt and ownership. Basically a spreadsheet or a database. Over the years, the Uruk-machine demanded increasingly complicated information processing, and its writing system evolved to accommodate those needs. Eventually the writing system hit a critical level of complexity and became our first method of universal and persistent information storage. It was used to track all valuable knowledge: rituals, lineages, strategies, gossip, complaints and memes. After many centuries, the original Uruk mostly dissolved. The region was conquered several times, first by the Akkadians and later by the Elamites. By around 1800 BC, "Sumerian" , the original language of Uruk, completely disappeared. However, Uruk’s institutions have endured. Nearly identical AIs survived in other cities in the region: people continued making the same art, worshiping the same gods, and following the same traditions, they followed the same cursed incentives. Even after Sumerian stopped being spoken, scribes kept using it for administration, and tablets were still written in it for many centuries after it ceased being spoken. Uruk's influence has outlived ancient Mesopotemia. We are still using Uruk's mathematics: 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 360 degrees in a c