I'd never considered that the 'Gray Goo' scenario[1] or the Paperclip Maximizer, might be informational and digital rather than physical. LLMs might turn every bit of computer storage into slop (goo) and then cause us to go mad turning the Earth's resources into making more computers (AI datacenters) to hold more goo. The GrAI Goo catastrophy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjntrqhn8pk
Alan Kay performs an improvisational avant garde layered audio feedback loop about Claude Shannon, live online during Kristen Nygaard's 100-year birthday celebration.
Alan was scheduled to talk about how encountering Simula sparked his early thoughts about objects. During setup, somebody had the live stream playing out loud near an open Zoom mic, so his own voice kept arriving back in his ears about 21 seconds late, over and over.
What he said was not random: "Shannon gave us a way of dealing with noisy channels." And: "I think about that almost every day. I realize what the fuck is going on and it's just so amazing." Shannon's noisy channel coding theorem is the math for exactly the kind of channel that was garbling him as he praised it.
Alan joked it was "being rerouted to Mars and back." At the speed of light, a 21 second round trip is about 3 million km one way -- eight trips to the Moon and back, not even a twentieth of the way to Mars at closest approach.
This is an accidental Zoom performance of Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room" (1969), where Lucier re-recorded his own voice in a room until only the room's resonance remained. Here what remains is the network: delay, compression, dropouts.
Bonus noise: YouTube's auto-transcript bleeps Alan's enthusiasm into [ __ ]. So the full chain is: Alan's voice, Zoom, stream, room, Zoom again times three, my screen recording, YouTube's speech recognizer, a censored transcript.
The fix: "Just turn off the audio at your end on Zoom."
Kristen Nygaard 100 Years — Celebration Symposium (Aarhus University, Aug 27 2026): https://cs.au.dk/nygaard100years/celebration
Entire Nygaard Symposium Recording (Alan Kay's talk begins at 3:27:49): https://au.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=fe0...
Alan Kay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay
Claude Shannon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon
Information Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
Noisy-Channel Coding Theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noisy-channel_coding_theorem
Audio Feedback: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_feedback
Video Feedback: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_feedback
Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4Kn3djJMCE
Live Looping: The History And The Practice by Stephen Garza: http://computermusic2008.wikidot.com/live-looping:history-an...
I Am Sitting in a Room: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room
Alvin Lucier on "I am sitting in a room": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9XJWBZBzq4