Did you mean for this post to have a writing style similar to that of Peter Watts' Blindsight (which explores the notion of non-sentient optimizers), or was that an unintentional thing?

(The above isn't intended as a meta-level question, by the way. But I'd also be interested to know if the George Clooney in your head wanted the team to signal approval of the ideas presented in Blindsight. Because that would be kind of ironic.)