Being ruled over by an unfeeling AI overlord making cold, calculated decisions based on pure data is looking increasingly great when compared to the clownshow idiocy of the second Donald Trump administration.
Sure, the AI dictator may well decide that us unpredictable and volatile fleshbags are a chaotic factor that must be violently removed from planet Earth to ensure stability, but at least it’s not a blathering, incoherent mess wasting everyone’s time with nonsense speeches.
So, it’s fortunate for all of us that the White House has just launched the dystopian-sounding “Genesis Mission”, billed as “a Manhattan Project for AI”. Well, at least they’re open and honest that, like the actual Manhattan Project, the result will be a nightmare weapon that will destabilize geopolitics and kill millions.
— Ask Perplexity (@AskPerplexity) November 24, 2025
The White House just launched the Genesis Mission — a Manhattan Project for AI
The Department of Energy will build a national AI platform on top of U.S. supercomputers and federal science data, train scientific foundation models, and run AI agents + robotic labs to automate… pic.twitter.com/7g6ZiKfcTZ
As detailed on the White House website, Trump is ordering the Secretary of Energy to construct:
“A national AI platform on top of U.S. supercomputers and federal science data, train scientific foundation models, and run AI agents + robotic labs to automate experiments in biotech, critical materials, nuclear fission/fusion, space, quantum, and semiconductors.”
Automated biotech and nuclear fission experiments? What could possibly go wrong?!
It appears the idea is to feed every piece of federally available data into the machine, which will incorporate “datasets from federally funded research, other agencies, academic institutions, and approved private-sector partners.”
Our dark mechanical future
The Genesis Project is ordered to be online within 270 days. This means that it’ll be switched on at around 8 am on Aug. 21, 2026. By 9 am it may have become self-aware. Hopefully, by midday, the nukes will be flying, and we can get down to the fun business of fighting endless waves of nigh-unkillable humanoid death machines.
I suspect the reality will be somewhat less dramatic. Despite the hooting of various AI companies they are nowhere near “artificial intelligence”, merely probabilistic large language and image models that spit out inputs based on pre-existing data.
Sure, there may be some quantum leap in computing that enables some kind of novel creativity, but based on everything we’ve seen from AI, the result of the Genesis Project won’t be scientific breakthroughs but vast amounts of taxpayers’ money being funnelled straight into the pockets of tech billionaires.
But hey, I’m sure that whatever Mechanical Turk they throw together to impress Donald Trump will be really complimentary to him.
