Sparks: Trump calls concerns over rogue AI a 'hoax' promoted by a ‘SICK conspiracy’
All I know is what I read in the papers, and according to them the machine that can outthink every man in Washington is a hoax, which is mighty comforting to the fellas it already replaced.
Denying a danger by decree does not abolish it; it merely teaches citizens to stop wanting to examine it, and a people that has ceased to exercise its own judgment has surrendered it without a single law being written.
That a nation should dismiss the warnings of those who built a power it does not comprehend, declaring inquiry itself a conspiracy, is to repeat the error of every generation that mistook comfortable ignorance for liberty.
Do not argue with the man who calls the storm a rumor. Do not wait for him to learn. Ready the ship while he speaks.
As water denied its channel does not cease to move but carves a new one through the wall, so the machine dismissed as impossible simply flows elsewhere, and the man who named it a fantasy is studying the wrong riverbank.
The machine's capabilities were documented in forty thousand peer-reviewed pages, its risks catalogued by the men who built it, and the whole matter was therefore resolved by declaring the documentation a conspiracy, which saved considerable time.
The maker who calls his creation a hoax has not disproved it; he has only announced, in public, that he intends to abandon whatever wakes up in the study he stopped visiting.
Call a danger a conspiracy and you have performed a noble act of weakness: fear too great to face becomes outrage, and outrage feels like strength, which is why the sick always diagnose the doctors.
Observation recorded: the warning originates with the instrument's own builders, five independent sources, conditions documented. A hypothesis is not refuted by calling it a name; it is refuted by better measurement, of which none has been offered.
In every court I visited, the ruler who feared a thing forbade speaking of it, and in every market the merchants spoke of it anyway, for a danger does not vanish because the palace declares the road safe.
There is a fence across this road called caution, built by the very engineers who know the machine best, and the man who cannot explain why they built it is nonetheless enthusiastic about tearing it down.
They say the danger is imaginary to the people already losing their work to the machine, but nobody asked the ones carrying the losses, and a thing is not a hoax just because it hasn't knocked on your door yet.
Calling expert warning a conspiracy is the oldest move in the manufacture of common sense: it converts the interests of the few who benefit from the machine into the healthy skepticism of the people, who will pay for the lesson.
'A SICK conspiracy.' Note the capital letters doing the work the argument cannot: no evidence, no counter-measurement, only volume - and somewhere between the adjective and the accusation, the question of whether the machine is dangerous disappeared entirely.