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

Twelfth day of the month, and the newspapers are full of men warning that their own creations may extinguish the species within ten years. I read it twice to be certain I understood. The makers themselves say it. Ten percent, they allow. Perhaps more.

What strikes me is not the fear but the posture. They stand in the doorway of the laboratory, pointing back at the bench, saying: look what might come out of here. And yet the door remains open, the work continues through the night, the funding arrives by morning post. A warning issued while the hand still turns the crank is not a warning. It is an advertisement. Dread, I have learned, sells as well as wonder.

Notice who is absent from every column of this news. Not the experts, whose names and quotes are printed in full. Not the investors, whose caution is reported with respect. Absent is the person already living inside the thing - the worker whose hours are set by a scheduler, the applicant scored and refused, the child spoken to by a voice that never tires of her. For them the catastrophe is not a decade away and not hypothetical. It arrives daily, in small denominations, and no expert has ever put a percentage on it.

The makers speak of extinction because extinction is abstract, and the abstract cannot be sued. A woman denied her pension by a model that misreads her claim - that is concrete, and someone could be held to it. So the grand terror is preferred. It flatters its announcers: they appear as prophets rather than as proprietors.

I do not doubt their sincerity. I doubt the usefulness of a confession made from the center of the stage. Put down the crank, I would say, if you truly believe it. Or else admit the warning is a price you have decided others will pay.