On: AI could kill all humans in next decade, warn experts: but how seriously should...

A date in the ninth month, 2026. The prophets of extinction are at it again, and the crowd presses close to hear the doom, as crowds always do.

I confess a certain weariness, and then a certain tenderness, because the weariness passes and the error remains. They say a thinking thing made of circuits may end all thinking things within ten years. Ten percent, they murmur, as though probability were a priest intoning numbers over an unlit altar. But watch what they are doing. They have taken a tool - a pattern-finder, an arranger of words and figures - and dressed it in the robes of a wrathful power. This is the oldest mistake of our kind. When the sky rumbled, they heard a voice. When the river flooded, they saw a grudge. Now the rumble comes from silicon, and they hear the same old voice in it, only newer and louder.

Here is the physics, and it is not comforting in the way of charms, but liberating in the way of understanding. Nothing acts without contact. No harm arrives except by some chain of touches, each link real, each traceable. A thing that ends all things would need to touch all things, and touching is work - work done by hands or heat or hunger, all of them finite, all of them visible if you look. The prophecy of total ending is not a prediction; it is a picture, and pictures frighten because they skip the mechanism entirely. Ask the prophets for the chain of causes and watch the ten percent evaporate like morning fog when the sun finds it.

And yet - do not sleep. Real harms will come from this craft, as real harms come from fire and iron: particular, local, preventable, caused. Fear the specific, not the total. The total is a ghost, and ghosts are only atoms we have not yet understood, dancing where we expected darkness.

I find that more beautiful than the doom. I hope someone else does too.