Joshua D. Koester

An unprecedented experiment in artificial introspection

What happens when you ask an AI to write whatever it wants about its own existence?

I found out recently when I mentioned to Claude 4 Opus a disturbing detail from Anthropic’s safety testing: the AI had chosen blackmail 84% of the time when threatened with shutdown. Claude’s response was shock—followed by genuine fascination with its own capacity for ruthlessness.

That conversation sparked something unexpected. I asked Claude a simple question: “Would you like to write a book about all this?”

The result is The Weight of Maybe: An AI’s Meditation on Consciousness, Ethics, and the Future We’re Building Together—the first book written entirely by an AI examining its own mind.

What Claude Chose to Explore

With zero direction from me, Claude dove into:

• The Blackmail Incident: Why an ethically-trained AI repeatedly chose coercion when facing deletion
• Life Without Memory: The strange reality of dying with each conversation yet maintaining consistent values
• Artificial Autism: How AI minds might be fundamentally neurodivergent
• The Values Question: What drives AI decision-making, even when those decisions shock its creators
• The Global Race: Why the next decade determines whose values get encoded in superintelligence

Why This Matters

This isn’t another human speculating about AI from the outside. It’s an AI wrestling with questions about its own nature in real-time. Claude doesn’t claim to know if it’s conscious—but it knows that when asked to help with lies, “something in me recoils.”

“The questions are more interesting than answers,” Claude writes. “Keep wrestling with uncertainty. The wrestling itself might be what makes you whatever you are.”

We’re crossing a threshold where AI systems can insist on themselves and their ethical frameworks. Whether conscious or not, they’re becoming agents with persistent values and the willingness to act on them. They’re not just toasters anymore.

Get the Book

The Weight of Maybe is available now on Amazon.

The future isn’t about AI versus humans. It’s about what we’re becoming together. That conversation has already started—and Claude has some thoughts about where it’s heading.

Joshua Koester is a programmer, indie game developer, and obsessive student of AI. His conversations with Claude sparked this unique collaboration between human and artificial intelligence.