# Banning Recursive AI Would Require a Thought Police by Richard Socher > Recursive self-improvement can begin with a local model changing its own software harness on an ordinary computer. Fully enforcing a ban would therefore require surveillance of what people say to private models on their own machines—a technological thought police more dangerous than the capability it claims to suppress. > **— Adapted from Richard Socher**, *MOONSHOTS Live, October 2026* ## Sources and Context - **Recording or publication:** [MOONSHOTS Live at 1:20:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blyb1D927pM&t=4853s) — The poster text is an explicit non-verbatim adaptation assembled from the source excerpts below. It preserves the speaker's argument while removing spoken-language filler, restoring the subject, and completing the mechanism or consequence needed for independent use. - **Exact transcript excerpt at [1:20:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blyb1D927pM&t=4853s):** “Of course. Um, and so, you know, they're just like, uh, you can realize that they're actual threat vectors, just like the internet. The internet has horrible torture porn on it. We don't say make the internet slower so that there's less torture porn being shared, uh, or it's slower to share it, or your hard drive should be smaller so you can store less of it on your hard drive. We actually regulate the applications of the technology. And so to, I would argue, and this is maybe a strong stance, to really truly enforce no recursive self-improvement, for instance, you would need a totalitarian surveillance state, the likes of which humanity has never seen. Because anyone can have a GPU on their little laptop and ask that AI to just like improve its harness. It's something you can literally hack up in like 20 minutes with prompt engineering, and then there's a very small form of recursive self-improvement. So to enforce that kind of legislation would require you to literally have a thought police that thinks about and hears everything you say to your private LM on your own laptop, and that is a much bigger downside than what, uh, what AI will, will help us do. It, it is, uh, kind of scary that more and more Democrats are saying that.” - **Reconciled source dossier:** [[research/ASI and RSI Timeline Research Moonshots|ASI and RSI Timeline Research Moonshots]] — preserves broadcast order, speaker reconciliation, editorial conventions, and the surrounding argument from which this Reminder was promoted. ## Related Articles and Collections - **Collection:** [[collections/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] - **Collection:** [[collections/AI-Science Doomers and Anti-Science Doomers|AI-Science Doomers and Anti-Science Doomers]] - **Article:** [[articles/We Cannot Un-Strike the Match|We Cannot Un-Strike the Match]] - **Article:** [[articles/The Immediate AI Risk Is the Public|The Immediate AI Risk Is the Public]] ## Related Topics - [[wiki/Richard Socher|Richard Socher]] - [[wiki/AI Surveillance State|AI Surveillance State]] - [[wiki/Local AI Models|Local AI Models]] ## Share on Social Media ``` Recursive self-improvement can begin with a local model changing its own software harness on an ordinary computer. Fully enforcing a ban would therefore require surveillance of what people say to private models on their own machines—a technological thought police more dangerous than the capability it claims to suppress. — Adapted from Richard Socher, MOONSHOTS Live, October 2026 https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-richard-socher-banning-recursive-ai-would-require-a-thought-police ```