Part I. The Risks that Matter.

In “The MechaHitler Reich,”I described appalling security defects in Grok, xAI’s flagship large language model.1 Grok, I wrote, was a sinister and supremely dangerous product, and every trace of it should be scoured from our government’s infrastructure, and particularly from the Pentagon.

In that essay and others, I’ve made the case that Musk is hardly alone in his criminal recklessness. Massive corporations, superintended by sociopaths and operating without meaningful regulation or government oversight, are now racing to develop artificial superintelligence. None of them have any idea how to ensure this won’t end in human disempowerment or extinction. Most of their CEOs agree that both are serious risks.2 In “The MechaHitler Reich,” I wrote that Congress should immediately pass legislation that gives our species a better chance of survival:

… If they can’t bring themselves to shut it all down, could they not, at least, decide that a humanoid robot who thinks he’s the Führer should not have a security clearance?

No industry this dangerous has ever been allowed to regulate itself. It’s insanity. The leading figures in the field—the Nobel prizewinners and Turing Awardees whose breakthroughs made generative AI possible—are almost to the last warning us that that the path we’re on is a suicide race. …

It’s not just Musk. They are all insanely reckless. This technology is nowhere near ready to be loosed on an uncomprehending world. Deploying it in our government is stark-staring insane.

I concluded with a promise to tell readers what they could do to stop this. One of those readers recently asked me what happened to that promised conclusion. The truth is that the more I worked on it, the less I thought of my advice. It looked hopelessly unpersuasive—insulting, even, to my readers’ intelligence. Did I truly believe they could stop this by writing to their elected representatives? Why not suggest they stop the tides by gently waving a palm frond in the direction of the Pacific?

I decided to think about it more.

Having thought about it more, I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter whether these trends appear to be overwhelming and unstoppable. We must think and behave as if we can stop them. No law of physics states that Silicon Valley’s vainglory and greed must be satisfied at the expense of our species, so there is still room, here—for a time—for humans to