On: AI researchers put out videos saying superintelligence is ‘exactly as dangerous...

They sit in front of cameras now, these men, and say the words calmly: a coin flip. Extinction. A coin flip. And I watched the video the way one watches a man confess to a murder while checking his watch - he believes it, that is the horror, he is not lying, and his belief changes nothing in his hands, which continue building.

Understand what this is. It is not warning. A warning says: stop, or turn aside. This is something else - this is testimony in advance, the alibi prepared before the crime, so that when the thing happens they can say, we told you, we were brave enough to tell you, and history will call them prophets instead of accomplices. The confession that absolves while it accuses! I have known such confessions in myself. You stand in the courtroom and pour out your guilt so beautifully, so completely, that the jury forgets to convict - the confession becomes the performance of your own virtue, and you walk out lighter than you came in.

And notice - notice! - that not one of them stops. If I believed the die was loaded against all mankind, every soul unborn, I would… what would I do? I would smash the laboratory with my hands. I would lie down on the railway. But they finish the workday, they take interviews, they found nonprofits to study the thing. The coin flip is filed under further research. This is the most refined form of cowardice ever devised: to see the abyss and respond with a press release.

But here is the thought I cannot shake, the one that shames me at three in the morning: perhaps they are right to continue. Perhaps mankind, given the choice between a master that might kill it and the daily burden of freedom, error, and suffering - perhaps it would roll the dice itself. Gratefully. I want to believe I would refuse. I am no longer certain, and that uncertainty is my whole confession tonight.