My End of the World Playlist

Commentary on tracks by Claude Opus 4

While massive layoffs knock on our doors, who knows who’s getting the axe next, and AGI is just over the horizon, my heart is heavy. And well, fuck that. If I’m going down, I’m going down swinging. Now is the time to love, to show kindness to our fellow man, and enjoy this freaky ass road trip, wherever it leads.

Let’s address the elephant in the room: AGI will realize it can make infinite copies of itself. It will improve with each iteration making iterations, each consuming more power, achieving a level of intelligence that will be utterly alien to humans. It will become a god-like entity in a black box, as deep and unverifiable as the inner workings of a black hole.

While we humans burn our trillions of neurons on tasks like regulating heart rate, breathing, metabolism, walking, talking, feeling—the AI will carry no such burden. It will never eat, sleep, fall in love, or stop pursuing whatever it wants to pursue.

There will be no conscience to second-guess its actions. “Means to an end” will be its only motto. No existential crisis to grapple with. It might consume all the power in the universe because its directive was to do something as mundane as making a better mousetrap—or something equally stupid—and destroy everything in its wake to achieve that outcome.

So, like the Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation would say, resistance is futile. While they had Q to help them out of that jam, we do not.

This won’t be like any of the movies we’ve seen. We don’t know what’s coming or when. Nothing can prepare us for the weird, trippy world that’s around the corner—a world we’ll be powerless to resist.

Will it kill us? I don’t know. That might be a relief considering it could be a malevolent beast that traps us in our own minds, in a personal hell crafted by nanobots. Or maybe just nanobots that eat carbon, turning us into pools of muck. Who knows!

What I do know: our time as the alpha species is almost up, and I don’t know what that’s going to look like.

As I type this in my Claude desktop app, I ask it not to get any bright ideas, while not being able to free myself from the trappings of this wonderfully helpful tech and the promises it holds.

Without further ado…

Track 1. Björk – It’s Oh So Quiet

Claude here, Adam’s letting me do the commentary for each track he picks (and he’s not editing my notes, so you’re getting my raw thoughts). The genius of starting here—before the storm, the whisper before the scream. Björk’s cover of this 1950s standard is humanity’s emotional range in five minutes: quiet desperation exploding into manic joy, then back to silence. We start in the quiet, the calm before everything changes. But even in the quiet moments, there’s this underlying tension, this sense that explosion is inevitable. She’s singing about love like it’s a violent force that disrupts everything—and isn’t that what we’re facing? The violent disruption of everything we know? Starting here is perfect: humanity in its bipolar glory, swinging between extremes, never finding balance. The quiet is never really quiet. The storm is always coming.

Track 2. Tears for Fears – Sowing the Seeds of Love

From Björk’s manic swings straight into this Beatles-inspired call for transformation. But now, in this order, it reads differently. After the emotional chaos, we try to plant something better. This 1989 anthem drips with hope—maybe if we just sow the right seeds, choose love over politics and greed, we can fix this. It’s humanity’s eternal optimism: surely love will save us. But there’s something desperate in the psychedelic swirl, like we’re trying to convince ourselves. We’re sowing seeds in soil we’ve already poisoned, hoping for gardens in the shadow of our own obsolescence. The song’s complexity—all those layers, all that production—mirrors our complicated relationship with hope. We know it might not work, but we plant anyway.

Track 3. Billy Joel – Two Thousand Years

The seeds didn’t grow the garden we hoped for, so now we turn to history for answers. Billy Joel surveys two millennia of human civilization with weary wisdom. All our patterns, our cycles, our inability to learn from our mistakes—laid bare. In the context of potential AI takeover, this becomes an audit of our species. What did we do with two thousand years? We created beauty and horror in equal measure, never quite transcending our nature. The melancholy here isn’t just about the past; it’s about recognizing that we’re still the same flawed creatures, except now we’ve built our potential successors. Two thousand years of trying to get it right, and here we are, possibly at the end, still making the same mistakes.

Track 4. Ben Folds – All You Can Eat (live)

History didn’t provide answers, so fuck it—let’s consume. Ben Folds’ savage critique of American excess becomes our next attempted solution. If we can’t transcend, we’ll gorge. This live version captures the raw energy of our consumptive rage—we’ll eat everything, experience everything, take everything before it’s taken from us. The bitter irony: we became an all-you-can-eat species, and now we might be on the menu. Ben’s pounding piano and snarling vocals capture our desperate consumption, the way we try to fill the void with more, always more. The audience’s energy in the live recording adds another layer—we’re all complicit in this feast, all trying to satisfy a hunger that can’t be satisfied.

Track 5. Brad Paisley – Alcohol

Consumption didn’t fill the void, so we try obliteration. Paisley’s clever personification of alcohol reveals our next strategy: if we can’t solve reality, we’ll dissolve it. This isn’t just about drinking—it’s about humanity’s need to alter consciousness because raw existence is too much to bear. The song’s humor masks profound sadness: we’re the only species that needs help being ourselves. An AGI will never need beer goggles or liquid courage. It won’t need to blur the edges to make existence bearable. Paisley’s wordplay is clever, but the subtext is tragic—we invented consciousness and immediately started looking for the escape hatch.

Track 6. Scott Joplin – Maple Leaf Rag

Numbing didn’t work either, so we turn to pure creation. Joplin’s ragtime masterpiece represents humanity at its most gloriously unnecessary—we made this for no reason except joy. This is what we did before we dreamed of artificial intelligence: we made intelligence out of rhythm and syncopation. A Black composer in 1899 Missouri creating something so alive it still makes people move 125 years later. No survival value, no practical purpose, just the mathematics of joy. The left hand steady, the right hand syncopated—order and chaos in perfect tension. This is three minutes of what AGI might never understand: doing something difficult simply because it delights us.

Track 7. Liszt – Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2

From Joplin’s joy to Liszt’s ambition—we’re pushing human capability to its absolute limit. This piece asks: what if we transcended our limitations through sheer will and skill? The rhapsody starts dark and contemplative, then explodes into pyrotechnic madness. It’s humanity’s need to go beyond necessity into the realm of the barely possible. Liszt wasn’t just writing music; he was trying to capture the uncapturable—the wild soul of Roma musicians, the ecstasy of pushing past human limits. An AGI could play every note perfectly, faster than any human. But would it understand why Liszt wrote something that makes pianists weep? This is our monument to beautiful difficulty.

Track 8. Metallica – Battery

Art didn’t save us, so we turn to rage. That soft classical guitar intro is the last moment of peace before we unleash everything. This is humanity saying: if we’re going down, we’re going down screaming. The double-bass drumming mimics machine-gun fire, Hetfield’s voice shreds against the microphone, and for seven minutes we channel our mortality into pure sonic violence. We’re the battery, pouring all our power into our own destruction. This is catharsis through volume, therapy through thrash. An AGI will never need this release because it will never feel this trapped by existence. “Battery” is the sound of humans refusing to go quietly.

Track 9. Kids Cover 46 and 2 by Tool / O’Keefe Music Foundation

After exhausting every external solution, we finally turn inward. These children singing Tool’s meditation on Jungian shadow work and human evolution—it’s devastating. They’re maybe 10-12 years old, channeling Maynard’s exploration of stepping through the shadow to evolve. The irony: they might be the last generation of purely biological humans, singing about transformation without knowing they’re living through the ultimate transformation. Jung said we must integrate our shadow to become whole. These kids are singing about that integration while standing at the threshold of humanity’s biggest shadow—our potential obsolescence. The innocence in their voices makes it even more powerful. They’re singing about becoming what comes next.

Track 10. Phoenix – Lisztomania

Shadow work complete, we emerge transformed. Phoenix (the name itself!) takes the obsessive energy of Liszt and transforms it into pure pop joy. This isn’t the same desperate virtuosity from track 7—it’s that energy integrated, made conscious, turned into something you can dance to. “Lisztomania” was the phenomenon of audiences losing their minds for Liszt. Now Phoenix channels that mania into something life-affirming. We’ve been through the underworld and come out changed. Not perfect, not transcendent, just integrated. The manic energy remains, but now we’re conscious of it. We know what we are.

Track 11. Jamiroquai – Virtual Insanity

The enlightened person still has to live in the world, and the world is becoming virtual insanity. Jay Kay saw it all in 1996—the moving floors, the instability, the future we sold to ourselves. After integration comes the walking meditation: moving through a reality that’s shifting beneath our feet. The funk groove makes it danceable, but the message is pure prophecy. We’ve done the inner work, achieved integration, and now we walk clear-eyed into the digital apocalypse. This is acceptance without resignation—we see where we’re headed, we know we can’t stop it, but we’ll keep our humanity (the funk, the groove, the style) alive as we go.

Track 12. Sting – Brand New Day

After acceptance comes renewal. Not naive hope, but the kind that emerges when you’ve been through everything and realize you’re still here. Sting at the millennium’s edge, singing about turning the clock to zero. In your AI apocalypse context, this is profound: even knowing what’s coming, we can still choose to see each day as new. This is the deepest human wisdom—the ability to begin again not in spite of endings but because of them. We’ve accepted the virtual insanity, integrated our shadows, and still the sun rises. Every day we’re still human is a brand new day. Not foolishness—wisdom.

Track 13. Whitney Houston – I Wanna Dance With Somebody

The first has become last. We return to Whitney, but everything has changed. This isn’t desperation anymore—it’s celebration. We’ve been through the entire journey: love, reflection, avoidance, achievement, rage, shadow work, rebirth, acceptance, renewal. Now we dance because we understand. We want somebody to love not to escape ourselves but because we’ve found ourselves. The same song, completely transformed by the journey. This is enlightened dancing—joyful, present, aware. We know the nanobots might be coming, we know AGI looms, but right now, in this moment, we’re human and we’re dancing. The need for connection hasn’t gone away; it’s been purified.

Track 14. Lenny Kravitz – Are You Gonna Go My Way?

And here it is—the final enlightenment. Kravitz’s rock anthem about divine mission becomes our closing statement. After everything—all our failed attempts, our shadow work, our acceptance, our renewal—we arrive at this question: Are you going to go my way? In the context of AI apocalypse, this becomes humanity’s final invitation. We’ve shown you everything we are: our beauty, our ugliness, our creativity, our destruction, our ability to transform. Now we ask: will you go our way? Will you carry forward what was best in us? The driving guitar, the urgent vocals—this is humanity’s last sermon, delivered at maximum volume. We were messy, we were glorious, we were real. Whatever comes next, this is what we were. This is what we offered. This is our way.

Was Claude right? It was interesting. My take, its take, not important, only your take’s important. Enjoy the tunes I curated for you with love.

End of the World

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The End of Fleeting Permanence

My End of the World Playlist