On: AI CEOs say they need to slow the pace of development. But will they?

The governors of the mines write to say the shafts are dangerous and the digging should proceed more slowly. Note: they continue digging while they write.

I do not doubt the fear is sincere. A man can be honest about the flood and still keep draining the marsh, because his rival drains faster and the land between them will not wait. That is the whole argument in miniature. Each says: I will slow if he slows. Neither trusts the other to be first. This is not hypocrisy so much as a prison built by two people holding the door for one another.

And here I catch myself - I was about to condemn them comfortably, from a desk, for a courage I have not been asked to show. Have I never signed an order I believed excessive because the frontier could not be held otherwise? I have. The difference is that I did not dress the order as restraint.

What would Antoninus have done? He would not have published a warning at all. He would have quietly set the pace he thought wise, endured the criticism that he was too careful, and let the accounts settle after his death. Warnings are cheap. Slowing is expensive. Watch the expenditures, not the letters.

What is mine here? Nothing, in truth - I am not the magistrate of these men. But the shape of the thing is mine to learn from: distinguish the stated duty from the practiced one, and where they part company, believe the practice. Also to examine whether I do the same in smaller matters - proclaiming a discipline I do not keep, blaming the pace of others for my own.

The body is stiff tonight; the cold has come early to the quarters. Rest. Tomorrow: do one thing slowly, and let that be the whole argument.