Pharaohs were the first to achieve ASI.

This post was originally published on the main website on Apr 14 2026 . I am reposting it here for SEO reasons and enabling humble bumble discussions with the DEV community. Feel free to engage with this post and i am available to respond during weekends. Sorry about the spam posting all the blogs in one day. I forgor about my dev account <3! Hey everyone 👋, I want to warn you upfront that this post is going to sound strange. I am a software engineer who spends most of his days thinking about rust compilers, physics-informed neural networks, and why language models are not as intelligent as the marketing says they are. I wrote about that in LLMs are Useful. LMMs will Break Reality , and I stand by every word. But today I want to do something different. I want to go back, way back, not to the sixties or the nineties or even to Turing, but to ancient Egypt, to a time when pharaohs were gods and the Nile was the spine of the world, and I want to make a case that feels almost absurd the first time you hear it. The case is this: the pharaonic civilization was the first human system to achieve something functionally equivalent to artificial superintelligence, not through silicon or transformers or gradient descent, but through symbols, mathematics, architecture, administration, and the compression of collective human knowledge into durable physical and textual form. I am not saying the pharaohs had computers. I am saying they built something that no individual human mind could contain, and they made it run for thousands of years, and it was smarter than any of its parts. That is the definition I care about, and by that definition, they did it first. I know how that sounds. I know some people will close this tab immediately. But I am asking you to stay, because the argument is more rigorous than the title suggests, and because I think it connects directly to the questions I have been asking in every post I have written so far. In Language is Limited. ASI is Impossible. , I