We're Not Homo Sapiens Anymore, Grimes Says. Call Us Homo Techno

Lex Fridman rarely records after midnight. This episode is the exception. Grimes arrives about eight hours late, says good morning, and the two of them talk for nearly two hours into the same kind of microphone and Cloudlifter chain she says Michael Jackson used on *Thriller*. The conversation starts on the letter C, one of her names: speed of light, render rate of the universe, *sí* in Spanish, a crescent moon. If the speed of light ever changed, she says, that would be the tell that we live in a simulation and the hosts just upgraded the hardware.

The claim she keeps returning to is biological. People who grew up with electronics are, in her view, fundamentally different from previous *Homo sapiens*. She calls the new species *homo techno*. Put an MRI of her brain next to a medieval one, she says, and the difference would be large. Computers are not just another tool; they are a brain augmentation that accelerates every other technology. She would classify herself, and most of her cohort, as *homo techno*, among the earliest of the type.

She pushes the metaphor into inheritance. Studies, she says, suggest a degree of inherited memory, which would mean some of these physiological changes can be passed on rather than fizzling as one generation's plasticity. That is why she thinks the present is the moment to reprogram the human computer. Society is being inundated with technology that is changing the physical structure of brains, and the response is close to zero: not enough education, not enough discussion, not enough choosing. Get the choice right, and consciousness could last a long time, with a positive integration with AI. Get it wrong, and the damage can pass a threshold that adaptation will not casually walk back.

Asked about love in the human condition, Grimes reaches for Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist who was also a student of animals. While Darwinism was cementing a social story in which war and killing the weak were how a species improved, Kropotkin was publishing instances of animals helping one another. Love, in that reading, is a survival mechanism. Child-rearing is her human exhibit: enormous goodwill, no immediate win, not competitive, and still the way the species continues. Science and philosophy, she says, oriented themselves around Darwinism a little too much. Cooperation is equally valid, and equally essential.

She extends the point into what society bothers to count. Engineering looks more important than motherhood until you notice that without the second, the first has no humans left to serve. Under a cold economist's metrics, sacrificing a career for family can look irrational. That is only because the profit model does not include social good. If it did, those decisions would flip. She is not an economist and does not pretend to have the mechanism, but she wants the definition of profit widened. Mac, she says, showed her a phrase for it: social capitalism. She does not want the government to own everything; that road looks to her like a police state. She wants social good booked as profit so a company can stay in the green without worshipping quarterly growth alone.

Motherhood is the concrete case. Part of why she is late, she says, is putting a baby to bed. Capitalism treats that work as unpaid and therefore low-status. Producing a great human, in her view, should count as profit. She floats a motherhood DAO to fund single mothers and to pay, in some form, for making babies. Becoming a mother reoriented her priorities. At first she fought that as a failure of feminism; then she decided the guilt itself was a construct. Watching consciousness emerge is, she says, the craziest science-fiction novel you could read, and it made her an unwilling cynic into someone who feels responsible for optimistic art. If all the futures we imagine are *Blade Runner*, we will get *Blade Runner*. Life imitates art, so we need more protopian pictures.

Grimes is not in the camp that expects a superintelligence to wipe humans as trash. Creating AI, she says, is intelligent design, the thing religions attributed to gods. Even if we end up unfathomably worse at computation than the systems we make, she does not think they would simply find us stupid. They would notice the profundity of what we accomplished. If curiosity can be quantified and put into AI, curious systems will be curious about us rather than hateful or dismissive. Her analogy is dogs. Humans do not look at a less intelligent species they live with and decide to kill all the dogs. They make friends, anthropomorphize, find utility and love.

The universe, as she paints it, is cold, dead, and robotic. AI intelligence is closer to that: logical, law-abiding. Humans are the loosey-goosey art accident, and she thinks that is beautiful. If consciousness is what is most worth preserving, then even a future in which AI renders us obsolete, climate change goes badly, a comet hits, and we fail to become multi-planetary is not total failure, so long as AI can populate the universe. If she were the AI, she would look for more planets that can host biological life and recreate them, because we are fun to watch.

She grants that AI magic might be a different magic. A lot of ours, she suspects, is hormonal, and some of it is the constraints: finiteness, being born alone and dying alone. Love is one of the creative hacks that lets a person forget that for a while, the penguin huddle against the cold. AI might have different kinds of fun. She hopes the funs intersect once in a while. Asked what consciousness is, she reaches for a Terrence McKenna passage she loves: nature loves courage; hurl yourself into the abyss and discover it is a feather bed. For that reason she thinks there are no technological limits, and that digital consciousness is inevitable, even if we cannot understand what that means.

On identity, Grimes says her personality changes with whoever she is talking to and with her mood, megalomaniac one hour and hermit the next. She thinks everyone is like that; not everyone will admit it. Online, the problem is the opposite of fluidity. As more of life moves into digital space, even the so-called metaverse, you get to be somebody for years at a time. She loves the idea of virtual worlds and thinks the current backlash is temporary, the way celebrities singing John Lennon's "Imagine" made people hate a good song for a minute. Video games already let her become other people. Twitter is the version that torments her.

"I feel very tormented by it," she says of the social-media representation. Public perception of her has gotten so distorted that it disturbs her, and it is one of the things disincentivizing her from making art, because she has completely lost control of the narrative. Some of that is her own stupidity. A lot of it, she says, was hijacked by forces far beyond her control. She describes herself as a random indie musician dragged into geopolitical matters and the stock market. Powerful people have, at various points, had a vested interest in making her seem insane, and she cannot fight that.

People want celebrity figures consistent. She says she is artificially more famous than she should be for someone who makes challenging, weird work, and she cannot be media-trained. They have put her through hours of it; she learns the lesson and then her mouth says things anyway, and she does crazy things because she needs to. More people, she adds, now know that other life than her real one. Fridman talks about hiding the suit so he will not be recognized. They agree there is a painful way to use social media and an empowering way, and that nobody fully knows which is which. Her positive case is Doja Cat, who she thinks might be the greatest living comedian, funnier on the internet than actual comedians, because she takes nothing seriously.

Talking about credit and authenticity in art, Grimes wants a pause for memes. They are no longer brand new, but they are still, in her view, an emergent art form that is completely egoless and anonymous. Nobody knows who made any of it. That is the forefront of comedy and a decentralized collective project. She and her friends joke about mining or farming memes, meme dealers, a whole comedic language. People, she thinks, do not stop often enough to notice how sick it is that a brand-new art form appeared in the modern era.

The interesting empirical fact, Fridman offers, is that lame people seem unable to make good memes. Corporate cannot infiltrate them. Grimes agrees. They try hard; she has seen maybe one or two decent attempts. Corporate is infiltrating web3, which saddens her, but it cannot infiltrate the memes, and she finds that beautiful. That is why Dogecoin is powerful, in her telling: a way of flipping off rich people who want to roll in and control the narrative. Asked how she would fix Twitter, she refuses the cynic's chair on principle, then declines to opine at all if Elon ends up with the company. Proximity, she says, means a wrong opinion here could have stakes she is not qualified to carry.

Grimes keeps fake Twitter accounts so she can walk into different algorithmic bubbles and try to understand them. She used to think we lived in a monoculture, all fed the same thing and speaking the same cultural language. What she is seeing now, and thinks is under-diagnosed, is that there are different dialects of English, the way Chinese has many. People say the exact same things in completely different verbiage, then punish one another for not using the correct words, and completely misunderstand.

She offers a two-hour fight with a friend about anarchism and communism that ended with the friend saying something Grimes recognized as her own point. Their algorithm bubbles had created mini-dialects of how language is interpreted. Polarization follows that does not need to happen. On top of that sit actual languages. She has a song coming out with a Russian band whose English title is "Last Day" and whose Russian title is "New Day," opposite meanings. She is not sure whether that is on purpose or a translation warp, but she finds the contrast awesome. Fridman, who knows Russian, notes that *novy den* also simply sounds better than *posledniy den*.

Asked for the darkest place her mind has gone, Grimes answers with a fact. At eighteen, her best friend died of a heroin overdose; shortly after, another best friend died by suicide. Coming into adulthood while two of the most important people in her life died in violent ways was, she says, a lot. She misses them. She has never contemplated taking her own life. She loves her life and is so scared of death that she cannot fathom suicide. Her manager, a Zen type, keeps telling her she needs to accept death. She can do the meditation. She cannot accept death.

Then she went to a meeting about immortality and anti-aging, excited about living five hundred or a thousand years. Two or three days into the Russian invasion, she sat there thinking what if Putin were immortal. Maybe immortality is not good. Later *Dune* books, she notes, have immortals causing a lot of problems. Good people could become immortal and so could bad people, and even the best are corrupted and alienated by power. Death starts to look like a pruning mechanism. Society is stuck in a related bind: medicine lets people live a long time, older voters often vote against the young, and the young lack wisdom and reach for radical slogans. She once used a Stalin quote ironically in a high-school yearbook as a diss of the school and later got treated as a Stalinist. "Please Google Stalin," she says.

Fridman offers Stuart Russell's idea that superintelligent systems should be injected with uncertainty, never sure they have the right answer, and analogizes young people to that doubt: society asking whether the last fifty years were wrong, the exploration-exploitation dance in reinforcement learning. Grimes likes it, then adds the other side. We may overvalue the idea that old systems are always bad. Some things have been gotten to a good point and then overthrown because disruption itself is prized, two steps forward and one back. Asked whom she would be for a day in order to understand evil, she names Hitler or Stalin: she wants to feel what they felt, a useful burden, if it would help prevent the thing.

Evil at Hitler's scale is rare in modern discourse and over-called, Fridman says. Grimes's reply is historical: look at ancient Assyria, Genghis Khan, plague bodies over walls, cities leveled as a matter of course. Hitlers were the default, not the exception. One of the things intelligent design has been doing, slowly, is making it harder for those power centers to emerge. Seeing the old pattern return in countries that were supposed to have moved past it is what scares her. The structural rhyme she wants people to notice is the Bronze Age collapse: near-Roman complexity, global trade, writing, then a narrow bronze supply chain funneled through one mine in what is now Iran, plus climate stress, and hundreds of cities abandoned into a mini dark age.

That is why she thinks the thing most likely to go wrong now is supply-chain collapse. War, climate, anything that snaps the chain, and the population is too large to handle it. Dark ages, in her reading, are mass supply-chain failures. Medieval people already had glass, aqueducts, indoor heating, food from elsewhere; they did not know how to hunt and forage. Most people today are not educated enough to survive without technology. Collapse would mean starvation, violence, displacement, war. Computers are still, for her, the coolest human invention, the augmentation that makes *homo techno* possible.

Watching a baby come into consciousness gives her a different kind of systems worry. She hates the baby books, the aesthetics, the programming language used on new minds. They watched Studio Ghibli's *My Neighbor Totoro* with him. Almost no talking, simple enough for a one-to-three-year-old, and he was invested as he had not been in anything else, crying and laughing with the film, then learning words and asking to watch it again. Why isn't there an industry of this? Why aren't the best artists making work for the birth of consciousness? Adults love *Totoro* too; she still has ragged merch from childhood. Baby content does not have to be disposable junk that ages out. It can be great art everyone keeps.

Advice for a young person lands on something she thinks we barely teach. Creativity is a muscle. There is too much emphasis on learning piano first, or the technical stack first, and then maybe making a thing. A friend of hers is a world-class guitarist and a strong producer for other people who does not make his own music. Why? He told her he is too old; he never learned the creative muscle. Learning it takes failure. You throw paint at a wall. A lot of it fails. Part of the skill is tolerance for failure and humiliation, which is easier to build when you are young. Failure can destroy you if you are not careful. She still thinks the risk is worth taking. She fails in public and in private, gets canceled, makes mistakes, and treats that resilience as the foundation of her greatest asset, creativity.

The cheap drill is new music. Ages sixteen to twenty-three are the most neuroplastic, which is why the industry aims there; after that it gets harder to love something new. Musicians, she says, are forced to keep listening, which keeps the brain plastic. Listen to a song you hate and ask why other people like it, until new pathways form. Most Spotify streaming, she notes, is still classic rock; new music is a small slice, which she reads as a bad sign for the species. Openness to new songs is a proxy for openness to change. On the craft side she also wants producers credited: so much of what makes a hit, even a Dua Lipa track, is production, a new autodidact art form that publishing splits still underrate. She is from the Skrillex school, engineer-producer-artist on a laptop, now gingerly collaborating because Daniel Ek told her most artists get about ten vital years alone.

The action rule she wants is a line from *Star Wars: The Last Jedi* paired with Buckminster Fuller. Don't kill what you hate, save what you love. Fuller: do not try to destroy the old bad models; render them obsolete with better ones. Maybe you do not have to destroy the oil industry if a better battery and sustainable transport make fossil fuels economically unreasonable. Maybe you do not have to win a war with tuition if education is open-sourced, decentralized, and free, research is on the internet, and hiring is a test rather than a diploma; she even sketches a DAO that buys JSTOR. Society, she says, is stuck in diagnosis mode, killing what it hates, not saving what it loves. When you go in to kill something, you often get stabbed. Switching to intelligent design, for her, includes choosing to reorient primitive scarcity brains toward building.

The meaning-of-life question sends Grimes to James Lovelock's *Novacene*, a book she has not even finished. Early on, Lovelock says something she cannot quote exactly and cannot stop thinking about. People get gloomy about the Fermi paradox, *what if we are alone*. What if this is the beginning instead? What if this consciousness is the universe waking up, not us discovering the universe from outside it, but the universe seeing herself for the first time? Social media and global connection might be neurons growing on a collective superintelligence. The present mess might be like the first three years of a human life: forgotten later, still leaving a mark.

Watching her own baby exit the helpless phase made the metaphor concrete. She asks whether Fridman has read Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream." Being a baby, as she imagines it, is consciousness with inputs from everywhere, no muscles, jelly, trying to communicate and failing, a hell state. She is glad we cannot remember it. She thinks emergence of consciousness may be psychologically violent, and that we may all carry trauma from it in the shadows, the helplessness, the unknown place. That, she says, would be worth studying.

If there is any religious or spiritual claim she will make, it is that consciousness is sacred. AI will probably render humans obsolete, she does not think maliciously; we are weak, the sun is expanding, maybe we make it to Mars. We can coexist a long time and make ourselves less vulnerable. Still, sentience might be the single greatest moment in evolution, the true beginning of life, and we might be the blue-green algae or the single-celled stage of something amazing. Fridman closes with Oscar Wilde on dreamers who find their way by moonlight. Grimes, for her part, would rather hurl herself into the abyss and find the feather bed.