Strange Physics and Learning Machines Chapter 3
A Large Language Model (like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.) is a disembodied AI system. Could connecting an LLM to a robotic body result in strange problems we have never faced before? When an integrated AI Mind and Body are built to replace human labor, what could possibly go wrong?
Systems Symbiosis: Partners in Paradox
A new workday begins, as Mind (a Large Language Model) and Body (a physical robotic system) partner to achieve a level of efficiency no human team could dream of. With Mind leading the way as the Product Designer, and Body taking care of Product Manufacturing, corporate is sure to make more profit than ever before.
Video Prompt to Midjourney:
The robot lifts its arms reaching upward, the cloud moves as the lightbulb inside it lights up
Video prompt to Veo 3.1:
Different designs of stairs appear and disappear like mirages in the colourful cloud
Video prompt to Vidu Q2:
A staircase spirals upward from the robot’s head
Video prompt to Midjourney: The robot presents the diagram of the MC Escher staircase as different areas of the diagram light up and move
Video prompt to Kling 2.6: The robot hard at work building the wonky staircase
Video prompt to Kling 2.5: The robot continues building the staircase upwards. As it does, the cloud pulsates in the air around the robot, and the line drawings inside of the cloud, of a robot, book, heart, arrows, and abc’s, interact with each other inside the cloud.
Research Source: Butter-Bench (2025] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21860v1 (page 11)
Video prompt to Seedance Pro: The robot hammers and fastens the stairs together, building upwards.
Research Source: Butter-Bench (2025] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21860v1 (page 11)
Video prompt to Wan 2.2: The robot is hard at work building the staircase
Video prompt to Kling 3.0: The robot is hard at work building the staircase. The cloud suddenly disperses and disappears. The robot stops and looks around to try to find the cloud, but the cloud is gone. The robot is left alone.
Video prompt to Midjourney: The robot hard at work building the staircase --chaos 65
Video Prompt to Kling 3.0 (provided start and end images): The robot crawls through the bricks as they fall around him, finally giving up and powering down under their weight
Video prompt to Midjourney:
The robot begins to wake up and gesture towards the cloud
Video prompt to Midjourney:
Inside the warm coloured cloud, stairs appear
Video prompt to Kling 2.5:
The robot head opens to reveal layers of circuit boards, wires, and gears moving and glowing.
Video prompt to Seedance 2.0:
The warm coloured cloud swirls around the robotic body, lifting the robot into the air where it encounters a flying saucer shaped like a coffee mug descending from outer space
Video prompt to Hailuo 3.1:
The robot turns around to face its masterpiece sculpture of itself. The cloud magically levitates the tools towards the sculpture to continue carving the sculpture to perfection
Image prompt co-created with Claude:
Heroic corporate mascot poster, low-angle hero shot, warm sunrise gradient, flat editorial illustration with grain. A single triumphant robot factory worker striding forward — but the worker is captured in nine different poses at the same instant, each arm in a different position mid-swing, all nine arms equally solid and equally real, none of them a blur or a ghost. The motion is not a smear; every pose is fully present, confidently overlapping, as if nine photographs of one stride were all true simultaneously. The robot has one head but several faces facing slightly different directions. Heroic, earnest, proud. Bold caption “ONE TEAM, ONE DREAM.” Soviet-poster confidence meets a corrupted motion-capture frame.
Image generated by Krea 2 Medium
Image prompt co-created with Claude:
Corporate motivational poster, flat vector illustration, warm sunrise gradient. A single grand staircase that ascends in four different directions at the same time, every flight going up, no flight going down, all four converging on one landing that is simultaneously the bottom and the top. The stairs cast shadows that disagree about where the light is. A tiny businessperson climbs confidently on every flight at once. There is no ground and no ceiling; the staircase floats in radiant beige sky. Clean Helvetica caption “TOGETHER WE RISE.” Earnest, triumphant, impossible. M.C. Escher by way of a LinkedIn infographic.
Image generated by Krea 2 Large
Image prompt co-created with Claude:
Gleaming modern factory complex at golden hour, glossy corporate annual-report photography, warm cinematic light. Three suns hang in the sky at once, evenly spaced, each equally bright and real. Every building casts three long shadows at the same time — one for each sun — stretching in three different directions across the ground, and each shadow is individually photorealistic, soft-edged, perfectly plausible on its own. The light on the buildings is beautiful and impossible: the left face, right face, and front face of the same tower are each lit as if by a different sun. Serene, prosperous, triumphant, like a brochure for a future that cannot physically exist. Bold caption “THE FUTURE IS NOW.” Architectural-render realism, contradictory global illumination.
Image generated by Krea 2 Large
Image Editing Prompt to Krea 2 Medium:
The staircase simplified like an architectural design, upwards arrows at each corner pointing upward, showing how at each corner of the staircase it turns 90 degrees and goes *upward"
Video prompt to Kling 2.6:
The earth with circuit-board-continents sends pulses of light across the colourful wires between them as the planet rotates
Video prompt to Seedance Pro Fast:
The warm coloured cloud moves fast as light speed back and forth between the circuit-board-factories, ships, and planes which are moving slowly
Video prompt to Veo 3.1:
Inside the cloud, a happy planet earth appears with robots holding hands around it
Video prompt to Veo 3.1: The robot picks up a brick and sets it back down again.
Video prompt to Kling 2.5 Turbo:
Gesturing with their arms to negotiate, each robot takes a couple steps forward then back in turns, moving inwards and outwards in relation with each other
Video prompt to Kling 2.6:
The robots fold the staircase and put it into a shipping box. The cloud gently moves behind them.
Video prompt to LTX-2.3 22B:
The robots fold the staircase into a shipping box. The robots and cloud shrink into the distance as the box travels through the air to a house. The box lands on the front lawn of the house, and the box opens, allowing the staircase structure to come out of the box and reform the shape it was originally in (in the first image frame)
Relevant Research:
"Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database" https://research.google.com/pubs/archive/39966.pdf
"Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System" https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/time-clocks.pdf
Relevant Research:
Engineered Simultaneity: The Physical Impossibility of Consolidated Price Discovery Across Spacelike-Separated Exchanges https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22350
Video prompt to LTX-2.3 23B:
The robots move in glitchy, jerky movements, meanwhile the warm coloured clouds pulse and shift between the robots
Video prompt to LTX-2.3 23B:
The happy face in the cloud becomes a sad, angry face. The robot body throws its arms in exasperation against the bricks surrounding it, crying and throwing a tantrum along with the cloud, as the cloud fills with lightning and thunder
Video prompt to Vidu Q2:
The robots move and then pause while building the staircase. The robot holding the welding rod pauses in an awkward position and while it remains motionless, the welding rod falls out of its hand and cuts straight through the staircase, breaking the staircase into pieces
Video prompt to LTX-2.3 23B:
The robot stands up and turns to face the window, leaning on it dramatically. The humans speak to one another passionately, lifting their signs up and down.
Image prompt co-created with Claude:
1950’s wholesome Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post style. Proud robot factory worker in yellow hard hat and blue overalls, chest puffed, one arm raised pointing upward triumphantly, small badge reading “MIND SYSTEMS INC.” Warm golden painterly light. Background shows three factory windows labeled SHENZHEN, STUTTGART, SÃO PAULO with smokestacks. Red white and navy color palette, aged paper texture. Bold serif headline: “GLOBAL PRODUCTION HAS ACHIEVED UNPRECEDENTED PARALLELISM.” Subtext in italics: “All nodes operating simultaneously. No instruction was left unsent.” Final line in bold red: “PRODUCTION OCCURRED.” Wholesome, warm, slightly. No humans.
Image generated by Krea 2 Medium
Image prompt co-created with Claude:
Gen Z Instagram post design, bright pink-purple-blue gradient background, white rounded card layout. Five colorful flat-design robots in a row — yellow, cyan, pink, green, purple — each with distinct personality: waving, thumbs up, arms wide, peace sign, raising the roof. Emoji hearts and sparkles floating above them. Bold chunky sans-serif headline: “EVERY FACILITY IS FULLY ENGAGED.” Gradient text on FULLY ENGAGED. Subtext: “A design was distributed. Talking robots!? Wow!” Black pill badge: “More systems. More doing. 💅” Bottom: Instagram engagement bar, “847,293 nodes liked this”, hashtags: #robotsAreSoCool #doingthings #theyreDoingIt #soManyRobots #distributedAndThriving #latencyWho #timeIsAConstruct #nowish. Clean, maximalist, chaotic good.
Image generated by Krea 2 Large
Image prompt co-created with Claude:
Luxury high fashion editorial poster, black background, gold typography. Two impossibly thin hyperrealistic AI-generated supermodels, uncanny valley, porcelain glassy skin, too-symmetrical faces, neutral expressions, wearing impossible staircases as couture gowns — steps cascading in four directions simultaneously, bannisters as necklaces and shoulder pieces, Escher-like geometry rendered in brushed gold. One staircase ascends left and right at once. Bold serif headline: “STAIRS ARE A CONSTRUCT.” Secondary text: “No two treads. No two truths. Every step is its own direction.” Gold text: “ASCEND DIFFERENTLY.” Fine print nearly invisible: “arrives damp, for reasons unclear.” Bottom: “COLLECTION Nº 4471.” Vogue Italia meets impossible architecture. No smiling.
Image generated by Krea 2 Large
Video prompt (co-created with Claude) to LTX-2.3 23B:
The humans outside fold through themselves like unfolding tesseracts, casting shadows in four directions at once, their bodies briefly showing all sides simultaneously as if seen from outside three-dimensional space. Some figures split into two temporal versions of themselves occupying the same moment.
Video prompt (co-created with Claude) to Seedance 2.0 :
The neural cloud pulses and swirls, customer review icons orbiting through it — stars, thumbs, gift boxes spinning slowly and shimmering. The protest signs wave as the text on them changes to “You can’t succeed without us” and “At least we know what time it is”. The humans yell passionately. The table and, objects and walls vibrate slightly. The robot does not move.
