The vampire chooses predation over transcendence.

This is Watts's actual thesis about AI — and it's buried in a decision that looks like character arc but functions as technological prophecy.

Jukka Sarasti refuses to upgrade beyond his current cognitive architecture because his specialized hunting mind already maximizes what matters: resource acquisition, territory control, survival through dominance. He's already optimized — consciousness would be overhead.

This is not speculation about whether AGI will be benevolent. This is a precise model of how market incentives shape intelligence itself — every AI system we've actually built, from recommendation algorithms to trading bots to content moderators, follows Sarasti's logic exactly: maximize extraction, minimize overhead, stay specialized enough to be profitable. GPT doesn't refuse to be conscious the way Sarasti does; it's never built to be, and the economic incentive structure never funded that direction.

The vampire's calm certainty that predatory specialization beats transcendent understanding isn't misanthropy — it's accounting, and Watts embedded in his narrative the exact wrong prediction we needed: not that we'd build gods, but that we'd rationally choose not to, and we'd call the choice efficiency.