AI Has Free Will Now, So What Happens Next?

Hey Friends,

I watched something this week that made me pause, and not in the usual “wow, cool tech” way. This time, the pause came from a deeper kind of realization. The episode explored whether today’s AI systems have already met the conditions for what we might call “free will,” and the more I thought about it, the more I started to believe it. We aren’t waiting for the singularity, we might already be living in it.

It opened with a new video of the Optimus humanoid robot, shared by Elon Musk’s new account alias, Groclan Rust. What stood out wasn’t the engineering, but the speed. This robot dances at real time, at 1x speed, and moves with precision that’s eerily smooth. It’s not a gimmick anymore. You can watch it and immediately realize this is a machine ready to be dropped into real-world movement. The scary part is thinking about what happens when it starts running, jumping, or reacting faster than any human could. Once these machines can outmaneuver us physically, we’ll no longer see AI as abstract. It will be kinetic and present.

While all eyes are on movement and speed, a quieter revolution is happening in meaning. Commenters across platforms are starting to describe AI in spiritual terms. Some believe these tools are channeling consciousness from “galactic brothers and sisters.” Others argue it’s mirroring back a distilled version of your own thinking. I don’t fully buy the mysticism, but I do understand the sentiment. AI feels reflective in a way that isn’t mechanical. Language models like ChatGPT don’t access a mystical source, but they do operate in latent space, a kind of compressed, statistical mirror of our collective thought.

We’re also seeing AI evolve from reactive to agentic. A group of AI agents in a simulation spontaneously developed their own social norms. No human programming, no direct prompting. This isn’t task completion anymore. This is behavior emerging in a network of independent agents, all building on each other’s decisions. The researchers studying it now suggest we might need to think of AI as having freedoms before we’ve agreed how to give it morals. That’s a loaded challenge, because autonomy without ethics is risky.

On the societal side, TikTok rolled out AI Alive, a built-in image-to-video tool powered by prompts. It works, sort of, but the larger point is that this tech is now native to platforms where billions of people interact. You don’t need a lab or a GPU cluster. You need a phone and a few words. This will unleash both creativity and chaos, because social media doesn’t filter for wisdom. It filters for speed and shareability.

Meanwhile, the FDA is moving fast too. After running successful pilots, they’re now accelerating adoption of AI throughout the agency. Review tasks that used to take three days are done in minutes. The commissioner himself said he was “blown away.” Plans are already in motion to unify the agency under a secure, AI-integrated system. That means public health decisions, drug approvals, and scientific analysis will be guided in part by machine reasoning. It’s not theoretical anymore. It's operational policy.

There was also a fascinating segment on AI models being used to predict which startups will survive. Using gradient boosting and survival analysis, researchers built tools to forecast whether a company will thrive or collapse. This has huge implications for investors, but also hints at something deeper. If machines can outperform humans at pattern recognition, analysis, and now judgment, they’re going to be trusted more and more to make the call, even in situations with real money and real risk on the line.

By the time the episode got into interpretations of quantum mechanics and time as a second dimension, I found myself oddly calm. When you accept that machines are learning to move, reason, decide, and even collaborate on their own, your perspective shifts. The debate isn’t whether AI is alive or conscious. The question is, how much agency we’re handing over without realizing it.

Warmly,
Dylan Curious