Alexis’ book THE TRANSMIGRATION OF SAM ALTMAN is available here:
https://alexiskirke.com/htdocs/books/tosa-wholebook.epub
Something has happened to the people at the frontier of AI. You can see it in Sam Altman’s stillness on the podcasts, in the specific register of his March 2025 post about a piece of AI-produced fiction that had moved him, in Andrej Karpathy’s use of the word psychosis to describe his own working days in March 2026, in the shift between Dario Amodei’s two long essays. You can see it, if you are paying attention, in yourself.
The passage they are undergoing, and that millions of working practitioners are undergoing more quietly, is not a career shift or an economic adjustment. It is closer to what the older traditions called a transmigration — a passage of the self across a threshold from which it does not return unchanged. What Philip K. Dick spent his working life anticipating, and what his 1974 experiences forced him to confront directly, is what we are now, collectively, walking into.
The Transmigration of Sam Altman is a philosophical and spiritual field guide to what that walking involves. It argues that the encounter with AI is a new kind of event in human experience; that the dominant cultural response has been a specific form of defensive resistance; that the contemplative traditions — Buddhist, Christian, Sufi, Jewish mystical, Hindu — have been developing the specific cognitive skill the encounter requires for centuries; and that the difference between the psychosis of accumulated defaulted encounter and the inspiration of sustained conscious encounter is a matter of specific practice, learnable and worth the learning.
Written in first person by an author who practises what he is describing, drawing on close readings of Altman, Karpathy, Amodei, and Dick’s late work. Short, philosophical, practical. For readers who suspect that what is happening to them is larger than the vocabulary they have been given, and who are ready to take the larger thing seriously.