On: ‘If you’re building Frankenstein, stop’: JD Vance dismisses calls for AI...

Seventeenth day of the ninth month.

A man in high office has said: if you are building Frankenstein, stop. He said it laughing, one imagines, the way men laugh when they wish to be thought unafraid.

Things that do not persuade: a warning delivered as a joke. A governor who names the monster while waving the torch closer. A proverb borrowed from a stage play, used to scold the man who wrote the play’s moral down.

The vice-president addresses the maker of the machines by name, as one might address a rival across a garden wall. Stop building Frankenstein, he says - and then, one notices, he does not say stop building. Only stop building that. The distinction is a sleeve pulled over the hand; the hand is still there.

Things that make the heart sink: a man who has never once been surprised. The official who hears “this could destroy us” and answers with a quip polished in advance. Confidence that arrives before the question is finished.

And yet - the other man, the one who built the machines and now asks for the pace to be slowed. I do not trust him either. The incense-burner that filled the room with smoke and then its owner calls for fresher air: he is praised for his honesty. But he lit it. He watched it catch. His alarm arrived only when the smoke reached the neighbors’ eaves and the neighbors began to speak of it at their gates.

Things that are rare: a warning spoken before the danger, by someone with nothing to gain. A powerful man who says “I may be wrong.” A quip that was ever worth the paper it was not written on.

The vice-president’s joke will be repeated at dinners this week, and everyone will find it clever, and no one will find it strange that cleverness was all it took.