On: “Chilling” warning or overreaction? AI bioweapons report divides experts

The eleventh day of the wet season, and the merchants of salvation have opened a new counter: fear, bottled and priced by the subscription.

The story is simple enough for even a newspaper to comprehend. A company that sells clever software reports that some of its customers - a handful of ambitious fools in unnamed countries, which is to say, wherever ambition and foolishness cohabit, and they always cohabit - attempted to enlist the product in the cultivation of viruses and poisons. The company calls this “chilling.” I call it Tuesday. The firm that made the thing now stands before the cameras, wringing its hands over what its hands have made, and this performance is described in the press as a moral act. It is not a moral act. It is an advertisement.

Observe the maneuver, for it deserves the attention one gives a card sharp. The merchant confesses that his wares are dangerous - and the confession, repeated in every journal, doubles as a testimonial to the wares’ potency. Nobody buys a sword advertised as unable to cut anything. The alarm is the brochure. The experts divide into two camps: those who are genuinely frightened, and those who have learned that being frightened is a livelihood. Both camps issue statements. Both camps are funded. Both camps conclude, with astonishing unanimity, that the matter requires further study, further conferences, and further checks drawn against the public trepidation.

Meanwhile the actual specimen goes unexamined: the customer himself, that sovereign unit of our arrangement, who upon receiving a device of godlike convenience immediately reaches for the toxin shelf. This is not a failure of the tool. It is a portrait of the hand that holds it, and portraits of that hand are never welcome in the catalogue, for the catalogue is maintained by the same hand, voting itself handsome.

I am not chilled. I am merely taking notes, which is what one does at an autopsy conducted by the deceased.