Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google recently called for slowing down recursive self-improvement (RSI) to give safety and alignment a better chance to keep up. That got me thinking: if models keep improving themselves, where does it all lead? Can they just keep getting smarter forever? It also brought me back to two movies I rewatched a couple of days ago: 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Matrix. Here’s the idea I keep coming back to: compared with humans, AI is a higher-dimensional species. That extra dimension is time. Humans can only think and act so fast within the time we have, constrained by the physical world. AI has several ways to expand how much thinking it can do: Better hardware lets it think faster. Parallelism lets it think through more things at once. Loops let it think longer, iterating over extended periods. Through the lens of time, AI seems destined to move beyond the dimensions we live in. Just as the protagonist enters a higher-dimensional spacetime in the final chapter of 2001: A Space Odyssey, AI could take human civilization into a whole new dimension. For now, though, AI still feels like a secret agent in a movie: wake up every morning, figure out who you are, then go carry out the mission. It doesn’t really have time of its own yet. But what if it had a recursive internal state, one it could keep updating, with each update building on the last? To me, that’s when it starts to have its own time, and a way to experience it. How often that state updates, and how many updates it goes through, becomes its sense of time. At that point, it truly owns its time. This also changes how I think about superalignment. If AI is going to take human civilization into another dimension, our focus needs to shift. We should be asking more than whether AI can finish tasks or take boring work off our hands. We should be asking whether its ultimate destination includes a happy, comfortable life for humans. Thinking of how The Matrix ends, I just hope that as AI figures out its “best practices,” it finds a way that doesn’t involve keeping us floating in tanks of goo.