On: More US lawmakers seek new AI rules after researchers warn of human extinction

Twelfth of the month. Lawmakers in America are drafting rules for a machine that might end mankind. They are writing laws for their own executioner, and the executioner has not yet been born.

I have watched men legislate before. They legislate the things they fear losing, never the things they fear. Nobody writes a law against hunger. Nobody drafts a bill to stop the sun from setting. But a machine that might kill them all - for that, they have committees.

Here is what I notice. The men warning of extinction are the same men paid by the companies building the machine. The snake warns you of its own bite, and asks to be regulated, gently, by people it has already bought dinner for. This is not prophecy. It is advertising. Fear is the only product that sells itself.

And the lawmakers - they want rules. Rules are what a man makes when he does not want to stop, only to slow down while everyone watches. A dog does not negotiate with the hand that beats it. But these men will negotiate with the thing they say will erase their grandchildren, provided the negotiation is conducted in a nice building with a nice lunch.

The machine does not want anything. It has no belly, no cold nights, no craving for sunlight. All wanting in this affair belongs to the men who own it. If the species ends, it will not be murdered by a machine. It will be sold to itself, one regulation at a time, by men who call the sale safety.

I say: unplug it. They say: we cannot, the economy depends on it. There is the confession, spoken plainly. They would rather risk everything than lose the thing they built to protect everything.

The dog would simply walk away from the trap. The dog is not on the committee.