2026-03-23 04:53:26
Epistemic status: pattern I keep seeing in my work. I work on building pipelines where LLMs generate formal assertions from natural language specs and I think a lot about what happens when we knotify [1] loops between human intent and machine output. Confidence in the observation is high, but the confidence in the proposed framing is medium.
~~~~~~
LLMs encode simplified human models, by compressing large amounts of human-produced text into lower-dimensional approximations of "what humans think like".
People are then integrating AI outputs as their own positions, especially if the output is genuinely well-constructed and confirms their priors. People in governance positions are doing it (sometimes on camera), many are watching, and nobody is building a breaker.
This builds a loop that's constraining human complexity (irreducible) into complicated (lots of moving parts, in principle reducible) models.
This loop worries me partly because humans are already bad at recognizing value in the first place. Imagine for a moment the internals of a human deciding to change a name such as Department of Defense to Department of War (aka now proudly hosted at war.gov). I'd bet some misfiring of internals happened there and if the felt sense of good can misfire at that scale, it can misfire anywhere [2].
I'm not sure how common or how spread out this is, but I've heard "even AI agrees" a non-zero amount of times in my social bubbles. If we take a system's output and use it as apparent objectivity, I'd at least wish we do it better[3].
The alignment community has proposed circuit breakers at the model level: constitutional AI, scalable oversight, mech interp-based monitoring, all as attempts to ensure the model behaves well, but somehow, through the nature of our society, the failure mode I'm describing doesn't require the model to behave badly. The model can be perfectly well-calibrated, honest, and non-sycophantic by the subset of metrics we manage to set on it. Nevertheless, the loop still forms. Here's why I think this to be the case:
I'm working in a job that's supposed to replace humans with AI. I'm part of the problem, though I spend more of my thinking power on figuring out where humans must be part of whatever process we're trying to automatize. I deal with the gap between verification (do we build the thing right?) and validation (do we build the right thing?).[5] In this gap, I try to model explicitly how humans are needed for grounding relative units of AI output. As of today, the sensefull take is that AI outputs remain underdetermined in quality until a human applies judgment.
The alignment community has spent enormous effort on the question "what if AI doesn't do what we want?" I think we need equal effort on the complementary question: what if AI does exactly what we want, and that's the problem?
I see we're sliding towards self-fulfilling prophecies and I'm wondering: how do we break out?
Eager to be made lesswrong.
By knotify I mean a feedback loop that ties itself into a structure that's too spaghetti to untangle easily.
Another example of misfiring happened during the agreements with the DoW.
I'm under the impression that "better" currently involves formalization of the mathematical kind. I see its breaking points. If not the one, at least one of the better path towards it.
Heard that one this week in a meeting.
I also expand it towards a mutually thriving direction, where I keep track of "do we build the good thing?", with a metric that accounts for externalities across agents (self x others) and time horizons (now x future).
2026-03-23 02:20:14
We already know how to build amazing systems: private medical data sharing, reliable truth-checking tools, fair collective decision-making platforms. Good designs exist on GitHub and in papers. Neural networks can generate even more in minutes.
..Yet almost none of them are actually used by millions of people.
The reason is simple: these systems are worthless until a large number of people join at the same time.
No users → no value → no one wants to be first → still no users.
This “ghost town” trap kills almost every good project. You need explosive growth to escape it, but normal growth is slow and steady, so most die.
Two common fixes don’t work:
Instead we get "infrastructural Darwinism": the winners are usually the projects with:
- the biggest marketing budget
- the best timing / hype wave
- the most aggressive growth tricks
- the strongest connections
..not the technically best ones.
What’s missing is a neutral “consensus sandbox”: a shared space where promising protocols are fairly tested(!), the best ones get proven(!), and then many aligned people adopt them together at once — without relying on money, hype, or manipulation.
Right now we’re stuck between cynical funders and chaotic markets that reward budget over quality.
The cost of staying stuck is huge: we keep running civilization on mediocre rules when far better ones are ready on the shelf.
Can the rationalist \ EA(Effective Altruism) communities build that missing meta-layer?
P.S:
I had the AI whip up some possible fixes (these are just a bunch of words, but perhaps they will give someone something to think about). Looked pretty decent so I picked the best ones:
2026-03-22 22:44:23
A 2022 LessWrong post on orexin and the quest for more waking hours argues that orexin agonists could safely reduce human sleep needs, pointing to short-sleeper gene mutations that increase orexin production and to cavefish that evolved heightened orexin sensitivity alongside an 80% reduction in sleep. Several commenters discussed clinical trials, embryo selection, and the evolutionary puzzle of why short-sleeper genes haven't spread.
I thought the whole approach was backwards, and left a comment:
Orexin is a signal about energy metabolism. Unless the signaling system itself is broken (e.g. narcolepsy type 1, caused by autoimmune destruction of orexin-producing neurons), it's better to fix the underlying reality the signals point to than to falsify the signals.
My sleep got noticeably more efficient when I started supplementing glycine. Most people on modern diets don't get enough; we can make ~3g/day but can use 10g+, because in the ancestral environment we ate much more connective tissue or broth therefrom. Glycine is both important for repair processes and triggers NMDA receptors to drop core temperature, which smooths the path to sleep.
While drafting that, I went back to Chris Masterjohn's page on glycine requirements. His estimate for total need is 10 to 60 grams per day, with the high end for people in poor health. I had just written that glycine lowers core temperature. What if those are connected?
Is fever what happens when you are too glycine-depleted to fight infection through the more precise mechanisms glycine enables?
The established explanation for glycine improving sleep is that it lowers core body temperature. Glycine helps activate NMDA receptors in the brain's master circadian clock (the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN). This causes blood vessels near the skin to widen, dumping heat from the core to the surface. The body needs its core temperature to drop in order to fall asleep, and glycine accelerates that drop. In rats, surgically destroying the SCN eliminates glycine's sleep-promoting and temperature-lowering effects.
Your mitochondria produce energy, and as a byproduct they generate reactive oxygen species (ROS), chemically aggressive molecules that damage proteins, lipids, and DNA. ROS accumulate during wakefulness. Amber O'Hearn's 2024 paper "Signals of energy availability in sleep" synthesizes the evidence that this accumulation is a key signal driving the need for sleep: wakefulness generates ROS, ROS buildup triggers sleep, and sleep clears them.
A Drosophila study tested multiple short-sleeping mutant lines with mutations in unrelated genes. All were more vulnerable to oxidative stress than normal flies. When the researchers forced normal flies to sleep more, those flies survived oxidative stress better. And when they reduced ROS specifically in neurons, the flies slept less, as if the need for sleep had partly gone away. Their conclusion: oxidative stress drives the need for sleep, and sleep is when the body does its oxidative cleanup.
The body's main intracellular antioxidant is glutathione, a small molecule made from three amino acids: glutamate, cysteine, and glycine. In many contexts, glycine is the bottleneck for glutathione production: you have plenty of the other two ingredients, but not enough glycine to keep up. If you are glycine-deficient, you cannot make enough glutathione, you clear ROS more slowly during sleep, and you need more sleep to achieve the same degree of clearance. That is a complete mechanistic chain from glycine deficiency to increased sleep need, and it is entirely independent of the NMDA temperature pathway.
Glycine is classified as a "non-essential" amino acid because the body can make it, primarily from another amino acid called serine. But the body only produces about 3 grams per day. Estimated total requirements range from 10 to 60 grams per day depending on health status, because glycine is consumed in enormous quantities by the production of glutathione, creatine, heme, purines, bile salts, and collagen.
In the ancestral environment this was not a problem. Traditional diets included collagen-rich connective tissue such as skin, tendons, cartilage, and bone broth, which is about 33% glycine. Modern diets, built around muscle meat and discarding connective tissue, cut glycine intake dramatically.
One group of researchers estimated that most people adapt to this deficit by reducing collagen turnover, letting damaged collagen accumulate with age, and that this may contribute to arthritis, poor skin quality, and other consequences of aging. Others have noted that markers of glycine deficiency appear in the urine of vegetarians, people on low-protein diets, children recovering from malnourishment, and pregnant women.
Fever slows pathogen replication, makes immune cells move faster and multiply more, helps them engulf pathogens more effectively, triggers the production of protective stress-response proteins, and speeds antibody production. But it is metabolically expensive (roughly 10 to 13% increase in metabolic rate per degree Celsius) and causes significant collateral discomfort and tissue stress.
Glycine enables several cheaper alternatives to the same functions.
Macrophages are the immune cells that eat pathogens and coordinate the inflammatory response. They have glycine-sensitive chloride channels on their surfaces. When glycine binds these channels, it calms the cell down: chloride flows in, shifting the cell's electrical charge in a way that suppresses the calcium signaling needed to produce inflammatory molecules. These molecules are called cytokines (the important ones here are TNF-alpha, IL-1-beta, and IL-6), and they are what drive the fever response. Glycine dampens the production of these pro-inflammatory cytokines while increasing production of the anti-inflammatory cytokine IL-10.
Pyroptosis is a form of inflammatory cell death where immune cells fighting an infection blow themselves up, releasing their inflammatory contents into surrounding tissue. This is useful for eliminating pathogens but causes collateral tissue damage. Glycine prevents macrophages from bursting open during pyroptosis without blocking the internal machinery that kills the pathogen inside the cell. The macrophage can do its job without self-destructing. In animal sepsis models, glycine treatment has improved survival.
Then there is the extracellular matrix. Collagen, the most abundant protein in the body, forms the structural matrix of tissues and acts as a physical barrier against pathogen spread. Collagen is one-third glycine. A three-year study of 127 volunteers (not randomized or blinded, so take it cum grano salis) found that among the 85 who took 10 grams of glycine daily, only 16 had viral infections, all in the first year and with reduced severity and duration. The control group reported no change in infection frequency. The proposed mechanism is that adequate glycine supports collagen turnover, maintaining the extracellular matrix as a mechanical barrier against viral invasion.
A glycine-replete organism can fight infection through these targeted mechanisms and does not need to escalate as aggressively to raising core temperature. A glycine-deficient organism cranks the thermostat higher and longer.
Elevated temperature directly impairs pathogen replication. Bacteria really do grow slower at 39°C (102°F) than at 37°C (98.6°F). No survivable amount of glycine changes that biochemistry. But the degree and duration of fever may be substantially modulated by glycine status, because many of the things fever accomplishes systemically (immune cell function, inflammation control, tissue protection) are things glycine accomplishes through targeted molecular mechanisms.
This leads to a testable prediction: people with high glycine and glutathione status should mount lower fevers for equivalent infections while maintaining equivalent or better outcomes. I am not aware of anyone having studied this directly, because nobody frames the question this way. But the mechanistic pieces are all published. Some are well-established (glycine's role in glutathione synthesis, macrophage chloride channels), others more preliminary (the ECM/infection study). They are just sitting in different literatures (sleep biology, amino acid metabolism, innate immunology, pyroptosis research) and nobody has connected them.
Remember the NMDA temperature pathway from the beginning of this essay, the one that made me notice the coincidence? It turns out to be a red herring as a link between sleep and immunity. The sleep pathway (glycine acting on NMDA receptors in the SCN to cool the core) and the immune pathway (glycine acting on chloride channels on macrophages to prevent pyroptosis) are completely independent. They involve different receptors, different cell types, and different organ systems.
So when I noticed that glycine lowers temperature and that sick people need more glycine, I was right that they were connected, but for none of the reasons I initially thought. The NMDA pathway had nothing to do with it. I had a true belief ("glycine, temperature, and illness are linked") that happened to be true, but my justification ("because NMDA receptors and thermoregulation") was wrong. A Gettier case!
But the wrong reason led me to the right question.
In rabbit experiments, glycine injected directly into the brain's fluid-filled cavities reduced fever caused by two different triggers: substances released by white blood cells during infection (leukocytic pyrogen) and prostaglandin E2, which is the specific molecule the brain's thermostat uses to raise the temperature setpoint during illness. This is a different operation from the sleep-onset mechanism. The sleep pathway lowers the thermostat from 37°C (98.6°F) to 36.5°C (97.7°F) to help you fall asleep. The antipyretic effect prevents the thermostat from being cranked up to 39°C (102°F) during infection.
So glycine suppresses fever directly (which might confound the testable prediction above), and unrelatedly lowers core temperature before sleep, and unrelatedly improves specific immune response in ways that reduce the infection-related inflammation that raises body temperature. Three independent pathways, with no apparent mechanistic connection, all drawing on the same pool of one simple, cheap amino acid that modern diets undersupply.
Glycine powder is cheap, roughly 2 to 3 cents per gram. It is mildly sweet and dissolves easily in water. There is no known toxicity at supplemental doses aside from gastrointestinal upset at high doses; 60 grams per day has been used in schizophrenia trials. For most people, 10 to 15 grams per day in divided doses (some with meals, some before bed) would address the estimated deficit. Three grams before bed is the dose studied for sleep improvement specifically.
This is not comprehensive nutritional advice. For instance, cysteine is the other bottleneck for glutathione production, and people who eat little animal protein or are acutely ill may benefit from supplementing NAC (N-acetylcysteine) alongside glycine.
Alternatively, you can eat the way your ancestors did: bone broth, skin-on poultry, oxtail, pork rinds, and other collagen-rich foods. One gram of collagen for every ten grams of muscle meat protein roughly restores the ancestral glycine-to-methionine ratio.
Before reaching for a pharmaceutical intervention to override a biological signal, it is worth asking whether the signal is accurately reporting a problem you could fix with inputs. Orexin tells your body about its energy metabolism. Fever tells your body about its immune status. If you are not providing the substrates those systems need to function, the signals will reflect that, and the right response is to supply the substrates, not to shoot the messenger.
2026-03-22 20:21:06
Suppose there is a fire in a nearby house. Suppose there are competent firefighters in your town: fast, professional, well-equipped. They are expected to arrive in 2–3 minutes. In that situation, unless something very extraordinary happens, it would indeed be an act of great arrogance and even utter insanity to go into the fire yourself in the hope of "rescuing" someone or something. The most likely outcome would be that you would find yourself among those who need to be rescued.
But the calculus changes drastically if the closest fire crew is 3 hours away and consists of drunk, unfit amateurs.
Or consider a child living in a big, happy, smart family. Imagine this child suddenly decides that his family may run out of money to the point where they won't have enough to eat. All reassurances from his parents don't work. The child doesn't believe in his parents' ability to reason, he makes his own calculations, and he strongly believes he is right and they are wrong. He is dead set on fixing the situation by doing day trading.
What is that if not going nuts? Would those be wrong who ridicule this child and his complete mischaracterization of his own relative abilities? Would it not be an act of benevolence to just stop the child, by any means necessary, from executing his deranged plan and bring him back to the care of his parents?
But now imagine that the child doesn't live in a big, happy, smart family. He is homeless in a town of other homeless children. There are some adults, like 20 of them, but all of them are occupied with preventing the nearby dam from breaking and flooding the town.
This child doesn't sit and wait for adults to come and feed him, like a responsible, correctly-estimating-his-own-abilities, non-arrogant, well-behaved entity he is supposed to be in the eyes of people from an alternative reality where towns are populated by big hordes of smart competent adults.
He goes outside, makes some tools to catch birds (tools are dangerous, they may hurt him, and they are just a joke compared to professional hunting equipment) and then lights a fire to cook what he managed to capture (the fire may of course burn his fingers, and there are no safety protocols, it is just a fire in a semi-abandoned post-apocalyptic town, and overall that's not how experienced adults would do it).
Is he still an arrogant, inappropriate fool?
Are you still in the position to judge his strategy?
I knew for a long time about the idea of heroic responsibility.
But to exhibit heroic responsibility, you have to be a hero, right? Right? Or not? When are you "hero enough" to do it?
As one saying goes:
You can just do things.
Can you, really, though?
Many are irritated by the hubris of this phrase. For there are, of course, reasons to be irritated by it.
And yet, as scary as it may sound, you have to just do things, even if you can't, because no one else is going to do them anyway.
You have to just do things, not because you have some special power to do things, but because you are forced, by societal incompetence, to do things despite lacking special powers.
You have to just do things, as a green schoolboy, because all adults are busy with something even more important.
And those who mock you for being presumptuous enough to think you are capable of solving your problems may very well be right. So what? Does it make you less forced to try solving these problems still?
So my most costly delusion was that I can leave some problems to be solved by other, more competent people.
To be clear, competent people exist. There are just too many problems and they are too severe for the existing competent people to fill all the problem-solving slots.
More concretely, in my case (and it may not be the case for other people) this delusion manifested as the belief that I should focus on tasks corresponding to my "experience" or previous "area of expertise" rather than on the most pressing tasks, because there are already people in the more pressing fields who have competitive advantages over me, and I am not going to add value on top of them.
That was an extremely naive take, resting on the assumption that pressing areas are not in extreme deficit of people.
It is not to say that you don't need experience and expertise. Of course you need them! My point is that the absence of experience and expertise is not a vindication. You may and you should gain them, especially since it is not as hard as you think to gain them to the level that allows you to add real value. Not because you are super cool and a fast learner (although you may be), but because the bar is set by the supply, and the supply is shockingly thin.
On top of that, because now it is possible to outsource a lot of low-level thinking and tool-level engineering knowledge to AIs, you may be actually plainly underestimating what you are capable of doing.
I totally get that you are incompetent, or rather not competent enough. I am also not competent enough. And in an adequate world, that would be a good argument not to do things.
I thought, as I grew up, I would stop perceiving myself as a child. But what happens in reality when you grow up is that instead of realizing you are an adult, you realize the others are not really adults either, and hence you must do the things yourself, despite being a child.
Being a child is definitely an obstacle, but not an excuse.
2026-03-22 17:10:28
Yudkowsky writes about Guessing the Teacher's Password as an abstract educational concept. At a young age, perhaps ten years old, I had guessed one commonly used meta-password: In the Finnish school system it's typical for multiple choice answers to include options that are somewhat similar, and often the actual answer can be reasoned without knowing much at all about the actual topic. Here's an example from 2024 admission exam for technical universities. I know no chemistry beyond elementary school, and you might not know any Finnish. That matters not:
Naively one might think that repeating the PHV-thing seen in the description would mean picking D. Unfortunately, we have better tools: teachers generate incorrect answers by either taking completely nonsensical things, or by varying only one feature of the correct answer at a time.
Just by looking at the pictures, we can see that D doesn't share the right-hand OH group every other compound has. So that's not the answer. Next we see that B is missing the downwards-going carbon branch (and so is D). So that is not the answer, either. We're left deciding between A and C. But A and B share the same squiggly mid-lane carbons. So the answer must be A.
I'm using overly strong terms here. Not every exam or every teacher uses this format. But so many do that it's extremely useful to notice this. Let's do another one, this time with text only, from the 2022 admission exam:
Again, we can simply look into the textual structure. All except B share the same first number, so it's not B. But the option A shares the same numbers as B, except that the order has been swapped. This means that the answer must be A.
In both these cases, the logic gives the correct answer. But not all questions are like this. If the options do not have the structure that has these similarities, using this method will not work. But at least I've learned to recognize this form over the years. Even though it's quite reliable, I normally wouldn't answer the questions using it. But if that doesn't match my calculated answer, I'd double- and triple-check before accepting it.
This reminds me quite a bit about pattern recognition in general IQ testing. Not sure what to think about that, yet. It would be a mistake to teach this trick to people who haven't noticed it themselves; I'm pretty sure such clever tricks hindered my studies at least a bit. A mild infohazard, even, perhaps. I still feel rather comfortable publishing this here, take that as you wish.
2026-03-22 11:53:45
I am the second most spoiler-averse person I know.
I once was considering going to an immersive experience, and someone told me the company that ran the experience, and this was enough for me to derive an important twist that'd happen to me in the first few minutes, and I was like "augh that was a spoiler!!!" and they were like "!??".
I then went to the experience, and indeed, it was a lot worse than it would have been if I had gotten to be delighted by the opening twist.
This is all to say, I think Toy Story 5 would be the kind of movie that, if it were good, it would be worth watching unspoiled. I am worried it will not be, but, I dunno.
But, also, I've been spoiled already, and meanwhile it's pretty interesting to think about in advance.
So, decide whether you're the sorta person who should stop reading after this opening section.
(Also, if you have not seen Toy Story 3, Toy Story 3 is particularly worth watching unspoiled)
Toy Story has always been a saga about the fear of abandonment, and obsolescence, and identity crisis. I have been impressed with how much they keep escalating both the stakes and depth there while keeping the same theme.
I.
In Toy Story 1, the toy Woody must confront that he is no longer his kid (Andy)'s favorite toy. His kid forms a new relationship with a new toy. Woody worries they are replacing him.
Meanwhile, Buzz Lightyear realizes he is not the person he thought he was. Space Rangers aren't real. His entire identity is destroyed. But, he learns to form a new identify, as a kid's toy.
Eventually they both make peace with their respective losses. And then, hurray, it turns out Andy has't really outgrown Woody after all. But, their relationship with him is forever changed.
II.
In Toy Story 2, Woody confronts the fact that, even though he got to keep a relationship with Andy... that relationship has an expiration date. Andy is is clearly growing, changing, and it's clear that eventually he fundamentally won't need Woody (or any of Woody's entire social world). But, Woody make the decision to stay by Andy for the part of his lives where Woody can help him.
("You're right. I can't stop Andy from growing up. But I wouldn't miss it for the world.")
III.
Andy has grown up. The time has come. Woody's entire old life is over.
In the climactic scene where they are on the incinerator conveyor belt, my sister and I kept looking at each other, our eyes conveying our thoughts:
"Surely... surely they will find a way out of this? Oh, maybe – no, they just ruled out that way of escaping. Maybe this other – no, they ruled that out too. Oh, now.... now they are just holding hands. They... wow it seems like this scene has really resolved. Man, I can't believe they're going to end the movie right here but this would, in fact, be a complete movie if they did."
My sister and I held hands along with Woody and friends onscreen. We all made peace with this possible ending together.
Then they are rescued, in a way that was actually foreshadowed in an excellent way that was a culmination of a subplot running since Toy Story 1 and was surprisingly satisfying. But, the grief and acceptance were real.
They go on to be "reincarnated" of sorts, repeating the cycle anew with a new kid, Bonnie.
...
IV.
"Surely they can't top Toy Story 3", I thought. "The cycle is over. Toy Story 4 is a lame cash grab."
Wrong. Toy Story 4 goes further.
In Toy Story 4, Woody realizes that he has fundamentally changed.
It's not really the right thing for him, to repeat the same life as he did before. Instead of either his life ending, or his life starting over but with the same basic shape, he must confront that his entire meaningmaking schema is obsolete.
Ego death.
What happens when you've confronted physical and psychological annihilation?
You find a way to keep living.
V.
Okay.
Surely, that's the end? Surely, the fifth Toy Story is a lame cash grab like the other more recent Pixar movies?
Well, I don't know.
I have seen the trailer for Toy Story 5, which reveals enough of the key dynamics I can see where this is going.
(Last chance to get off the spoiler train and studiously avoid spoilers for another 3 months)
...
...
...
...
...
In Toy Story 5...
(drumroll)
...the bad guy is AI.
The toys that stayed with Bonnie see her receive a new iPad-like thing called LilyPad. Unlike the toys, LilyPad can talk directly to the kids, can shape their entire life, and can interact more with the broader world than the toys usually have latitude to do.
Christ.
Toy Story 5 asks the question "Okay, but, like, what if your entire culture/species is going obsolete? What then?"
I'm pretty confident this'll be the topic. It's clearly what the trailer is pointing at, it fits the established arc. The new trailer features Woody saying sadly "I... I don't know. Toys are for play. Tech is for everything." The teaser trailer said "The Age of Toys... is Over?"
But, I don't see a way for Pixar to play it that would be good art, and, that would land as a Toy Story movie. (Or, there are some very ballsy ways they could end this movie but I can't believe they'd actually do it. Meanwhile there's a bunch of lame ways it seems more likely to go).
Previous Toy Story trailers have undersold how good the movie was. I'm afraid this'll turn out to be a lame "Message movie." But, Pixar's tract record is good. I wait with bated breath.
I'm not sure they'll pull this one off, because every previous Toy Story movie was presenting a type of conflict we sort of fundamentally "know how to deal with." We've seen this story before in other guises. People lose friends. Parents lose children. People die. People lose their entire sense of purpose. We somehow move on.
Toy Story 5 is tackling a situation that humanity is still in the middle of dealing with. Most possible endings have to take some kind of opinionated stand. And most of the stands I can imagine either feel fake or patronizing or both.
...
Let us review the requirements:
1. Toy Story movies fundamentally have to work for kids and adults, with the kids getting a fun adventure and the adults getting a harrowing story about abandonment, obsolescence and identity.
2. Toy Story movies are about toys, and play, and a particular ideal of childhood and the Child/Toy relationship.
3. Toy Story movies are, like, "wholesome." They are nourishing. They are not cynical.
4. Toy Story movies for whatever reason somehow always end with a crazy heist/escape in the climax.
(So far. You could do a Toy Story movie that subverts these, but, so far they have threaded the needle on grappling with all of these in a way that felt organic and True to a consistent spirit).
And then, there's the usual set of requirements for good movies. Characters grow in interesting ways that make sense and reflect their struggles. Ideally, something about the ending is surprising and feels meaningful in someway. etc.
So, what are the options here?
...
Bonnie decides to put away the iPad and goes back to her toys? (similar to Toy Story 1, where Woody confronts being replaced but ultimately gets to keep most of his old relationships)
But, like, do you really buy this? I certainly can buy an individual child doing this. But, Toy Story's metaphor is the toys are a kind of stand in for any of us. And the tide of Tech for Kids is clearly still coming even if one family made a different choice.
...
All the problems with A and also kinda Lame. (Takes the agency out of the kid/toy relationship, although presumably in this ending the parents change their mind because the toys somehow furtively highlight the problem to them?)
...
...somehow the toys convince, like, society writ large, to not give kids iPads.
There are versions of this that are a lame Political Message Movie and versions that are kinda cool.
I don't think they're going to do either.
...
Buzz Lightyear was the initial antagonist of Toy Story 1, but the movie ends with him and Woody both being friends and favored toys, and helping each other through their psychological problems.
LilyPad looks to kind of be a "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" from Diamond Age, (i.e. being actually valuable for teaching Bonnie stuff. We see that she speaks Spanish Español, and hints of being more broadly educational).
In the trailer we see Bonnie staring zombie-eyed at the iPad. Maybe it ends with the toys teaching LilyPad how to be a better friend/parent/educator/toy – something helps Bonnie learn but also prompts her to go outside and play.
I can imagine okay-ish versions of this ending, that sort of hint at toys all over the world working together to try and nudge kids and AIs toward a wholesome coexistence, where it's not just one family making a better choice but we see how society is steering towards a better equilibrium.
But, it still feels like this is an unstable equilibrium. C'mon. We know the tide is still coming. I would be surprised if the movie depicted anything like the amount of change/effort necessary for this ending to feel earned and enduring.
...
Toy Story 2 was about accepting that eventually, your relationship will fundamentally change. Kids grow up, they no longer need you the same way. The choice given to Woody is to then turn away from Andy, knowing that his relationship is ephemeral.
But, Woody chooses Andy. "You're right. I can't stop Andy from growing up. But, I wouldn't miss it for the world."
There's an alternate version of Ending D, where instead of pretending like we've found a new stable equilibrium of Toy/Tech/Human harmony... the movie acknowledges that the change isn't over. And the toys, both Woody/Buzz and (maybe?) ones across the world, grapple with the fact that this change is still in progress. And it may indeed mean that one day, toys will be obsolete, or must fundamentally change as a whole.
But, seeing that, choosing to still do their best to help steward the children while they can, being part of the journey as long as they can...
...okay having typed that out, I think there's a decent chance this is what they will go for. It grapples with the enormity of the situation, avoids having to make that strong a stand while acknowledging "look, we don't really know what's coming but we (the screenwriters) are going to do our best, and our characters will too."
This leaves the question of "okay, but, that's a hella cliffhanger. What's Toy Story *6*?"
Toy Story 6 could be a reprise of Toy Story 3, facing oblivion, this time across all toy-civilization. (See also, all human civilization).
Toy Story 6 could also be a reprise of Toy Story 4, realizing you must fundamentally change to adapt to a new world/situation – this time everyone across all toy-civilization instead of just one old cowboy doll. (See also, all human civilization).
...
The movies have always left the toys with a mythic, unexplained origin. Why are these toys walking around? Why do the parents not notice? How do Buzz Lightyears end up believing they are space rangers but still instinctively knowing to flop down on the floor if any humans walk in?
What are the limits of toys who break out of the Toy/Child script, that we've seen them do occasionally?
Part of why Toy Story 5 feels forced to me is, the fact that the toys aren't human and magic is real, suddenly strains my disbelief in a way it didn't before.
Obviously I'm a LessWrong-guy who has pretty oddly specific beliefs about how scary AI is, but, I think most people are feeling an unsettling sense that AI is potentially scary in an existential way, even if they have different guesses about exactly how that plys out.
I don't think they'd choose to do this, and, I don't think it actually would make as good a movie.
But, it is an option on the menu to make a movie where we take the brute fact of toykind's existence and the tide of AI that's coming, and... just, let that be a coherent-ish world and roll the simulation forward and depict whatever happens when toy magic and AI both exist.
I don't think they'll do it, but, I'd read that fanfic.
It is interesting that, the end of a civilization is also not something entirely new. Quoth C.S. Lewis:
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat at night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented… It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
But... there aren't... rituals for the ending of a civilization, that I know of. (Are there?). Rome fell, but nobody has prescribed a social script for a civilization facing either physical or psychological/meaning-making, to confront it's end together.