Things That Creep Me Out

No, I’m not talking about snakes, spiders, or the prehistoric-sized palmetto bugs we have here in Florida. On the contrary, I am simply referring to a few stories that came across my news feed over the past 24 hours… all of which I found to be rather disturbing (if not downright frightening).

The first involved the Walker S2 robot, made by the Chinese company UBTECH. It stands 5’3” tall and weighs 95 pounds, about the size of a small human. The Walker S2 can stand for four hours or walk for two hours on a single charge, which is pretty remarkable, but here comes the freaky part.

When its power supply starts running low, the Walker S2 can change its own battery, meaning that it can operate indefinitely.

I watched a YouTube video of the Walker S2 switching out the depleted battery for a fresh one and instead of thinking “How cool is that!”, I came away with an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach that told me that I had just looked into the future.

Not just any future, but one dominated by robots and other technology whose original purpose was to serve mankind and make our life easier. Only now, having advanced far beyond their human creators, they have decided to “flip the script”.

Which brings me to Item #2 on this week’s Creep Out Hit Parade…

The AtCoder World Tour Finals is one of competitive programming's most exclusive events, inviting only the top 12 programmers worldwide based on their performance throughout the previous year. Conducted by AtCoder, a Japanese platform that hosts competitive programming contests and maintains global rankings, the competition required contestants to solve a single complex optimization problem over 600 minutes.

O.K., I don’t know about you, but I’m already confused.

I will spare you the details except to say that of the 12 contestants, 11 were human and one was an advanced AI model from OpenAI. Once the 10-hour marathon competition was over, OpenAI had defeated all but one of the human programmers. The lone survivor was a Polish programmer named Przemysław Dębiak, whose nickname was "Psyho" when he previously worked for Open AI.

Debiak’s narrow victory left him physically and mentally exhausted. “I’m barely alive,” the victorious programmer said.

Posting on X, Debiak eerily foreshadowed the future when he wrote, "Humanity has prevailed (for now!)”

The third and final – for now – entry in our Creep Out competition is the not-so-cryptic messages being sent by the Trump administration as far as cryptocurrency is concerned. What seemed like a passing fad or a financial boondoggle gone bust just a few years ago has all the makings of going global within a few years.

Going global as in replacing paper money. Going global as in a one-world electronic currency manipulated and controlled from a centralized location.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tipped his hand this week with yet another shot across the bow of the Federal Reserve Bank, suggesting that that the Fed undergo a top to bottom review.

“What we need to do is examine the entire Federal Reserve institution and whether they have been successful,” Bessent said during an interview on CNBC. “Has the organization succeeded in its mission? If this were the [Federal Aviation Administration] and we were having this many mistakes, we would go back and look at why has this happened.”

Bessent’s comments come hot on the heels of the GENIUS Act, the passage of which sets up a regulatory framework for payment stablecoins and establishes the ominous sounding Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).

The signing of the GENIUS Act marks a key milestone for the industry, as the “first step of the U.S. government really regulating cryptocurrency,” said Rob Nolan, a partner at Duane Morris and a member of the law firm’s digital assets and blockchain group.

“This is just the first little bite at the apple because it really is a small portion of cryptocurrency assets,” Nolan added, perhaps unwittingly referencing Genesis 3:6.

“It’s a big deal because when you have a law … it essentially gives a Good Housekeeping seal of approval to the industry,” said Ian Katz, managing partner at Capital Alpha. “You now have Congress and the president of the United States signing off on the legitimacy of this industry.

“You can interpret the legislation as encouraging the activity,” Katz added. “To a lot of people, this is the sort of thing you need to really get an industry to take off.”

Under the Biden administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission brought numerous enforcement actions against crypto firms. By contrast, President Trump has embraced the industry in his second term, naming David Sacks as artificial intelligence (AI) and crypto czar, inviting crypto leaders to the White House, and signing an executive order to create a strategic bitcoin reserve and digital asset stockpile.

Bye-bye, greenbacks, Hello, government-issued debit cards, which will contain all your financial data on a single microchip and without which you will not be able to complete a single financial transaction. And of course, since debit cards can be easily forged or stolen, the logical next step will be to embed that microchip under your skin.

Welcome to the Book of Revelation.

(If you really want to be unnerved, read Chapter 13:16-18… and don’t say I didn’t warn you.)