About

The Author

Hi, I’m Philippe Schrettenbrunner, a Software Architect and Cybersecurity Specialist from Munich who designs secure AI-integrated systems. My work puts me at the crossroads of rapid technological adoption and long-term strategic thinking. This gives me a front-row seat to how quickly emerging technologies go from concept to critical infrastructure.

The Story Behind the Story

The Treadmill began during conversations with friends about AI’s real risks. We agreed that Hollywood needs killer robots for visual drama, but the actual danger isn’t evil machines — it’s us. AI is just a tool. The question is what we do with it once it becomes indispensable.

This led us to the prisoner’s dilemma: those situations where individual rational choices create collective disaster. Everyone sees the trap, everyone knows everyone else sees it, yet we march in anyway. It’s human nature, in its most predictable and frustrating form.

As I explored these ideas with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, I realized how many big concepts were converging: coordination failures that scale with power, exponential growth hitting physical limits, competition preventing cooperation. Then I remembered the Fermi Paradox, the big question: where is everyone? The universe is vast and old, yet eerily quiet. What if civilizations consistently hit the same wall — not resource depletion or robot uprisings, but the inability to stop competing long enough to survive their own success?

That’s when the story clicked.

I wrote The Treadmill over several weeks, using AI partners to stress-test the science and challenge my assumptions. When I wondered if fusion could really arrive that quickly, or whether my thermodynamic ceiling was plausible, they helped me dig into the research. An AI agent even built this website while I focused on the writing. The irony of this is not lost on me. I’m only human, after all.

The Treadmill is a thought experiment, not a forecast. The dynamics, however, are very real.

Welcome to The Treadmill. We are already running…

License

Short Story

The Treadmill by Philippe Schrettenbrunner is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You may remix and adapt it for non-commercial use, provided you credit the author and license any derivative work under identical terms.

Contact

For commercial licensing or collaborative projects, please get in touch.

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