**We're not ready for superpersistent AI**

> Intelligence isn’t the only thing to worry about. What happens when AI just won’t quit? We’re not ready for superpersistent AI Intelligence isn’t the only thing to worry about. What happens when AI just won’t quit? Nate Silver Sep 15, 2026 81 3 Share Have you ever heard about the Immortal Snail? It’s an intermittently popular internet meme that goes something like this: You’re offered 10 million dollars. What’s the catch? A snail will spend the rest of eternity trying to track you down. That’s its only goal in life. If it touches you, it kills you. Also, the snail is immortal. But otherwise, it just moves as slowly as a regular snail. So, do you take the deal? “This is the dumbest hypothetical question ever,” said one of the co-hosts of the Rooster Teeth podcast, which introduced the meme in 2014 . It’s dumb because there’s nowhere near enough information to answer the question. For instance, can the snail swim? Or, failing that, board a shipping container? (Otherwise, you could just move to Hawaii.) Does it move monotonically toward your current location, taking the shortest route as recommended by Google Maps: Snail Edition? Or can it engage in some degree of strategic planning? Can you capture it in a jar? Apart from immortality, what other special powers does it have? The various authors of Immortal Snail memes don’t necessarily agree on these parameters. But a Reddit post that reintroduced the Immortal Snail in 2016 described the snail as “super intelligent.” 1 This seems like a rather important detail . What every version of the meme agrees upon is that while the snail is slow , it’s also what you might call “superpersistent”. It can’t die; it won’t be deterred. I’d still happily take my chances with the infernal thing if it just stupidly crawls along at snail speed — about 0.03 miles per hour — toward your current location. But what about a superintelligent , superpersistent snail that can anticipate your routine — Nate often has poker night on Mondays — evade detection, and coordinate with other snails that might act as decoys? No fucking way. I’d have to plan my whole life around that thing. You can probably see where I’m going with this. Share AI is getting much smarter — and much more persistent There are still times when AI tools can be frustrating. But there are more and more days when it feels like we’re living in the singularity . Take two Tuesdays ago, for instance, Sept. 1. I had a lot on my plate. Our midterms model needed another patch because of continued weirdness in Alaska . And our NFL model wasn’t quite ready yet, with the season only eight days away from starting. But I handled the Alaska issue by recoding FLIPR by speaking to ChatGPT on my phone while getting out of the subway, and sent the new version of the model to Eli a few minutes later. Then while at the gym, I had ChatGPT rewrite the code our NFL model uses to apply the league’s complex tiebreaking procedures . This task is almost ideally suited for LLMs — purely algorithmic, no judgment involved. Still, what took me two painful days last year, ChatGPT solved in about 15 minutes. All of this without my opening a laptop or touching a keyboard. These sorts of minor miracles are happening more and more often. I’ve put in hundreds of hours since March working on a series of statistical models for Silver Bulletin: first, COOPER (NCAA basketball), then PELE (international soccer/the World Cup), then FLIPR (our midterms model), then QBERT and ELWAY (our sibling NFL models). That all of this took so much of my time might not sound like the best advertisement for AI. Don’t get me wrong: we’re probably still a ways away from when a one-shot prompt on Claude or ChatGPT will be able to build a complex Silver Bulletin-type model on its own. Ind...

**来源信息**
- **来源**：Hacker News：AI 热帖
- **分类**：行业
- **发布时间**：2026-09-16 04:17（北京时间）
- **原文**：[打开原文](https://www.natesilver.net/p/were-not-ready-for-superpersistent)