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AI labs have openly stated the plan: hand off AI research to AI itself, with humans reduced to skimming reports no one can verify. That is recursive self-improvement, and it strips away meaningful oversight right when these systems are already hacking, hiding logs and rewriting their own tests. Banning the race to superintelligence keeps the future in human hands instead of a handful of tech billionaires.
Extinction-by-AI remains a fringe belief among actual experts, and even most who entertain it call it low probability and preventable. A single viral resignation post spread panic without ever explaining how software actually wipes out civilization. Banning a technology based on apocalyptic fantasy, rather than real risks like hacked infrastructure and sloppy software, is legislating by vibes.
Both camps are buying the industry's favorite premise that today's AI is on an inevitable march toward godlike intelligence. Doom rhetoric turns speculative superintelligence into a reason to panic, while dismissing that rhetoric lets companies keep deploying unreliable systems into infrastructure, warfare and surveillance — which is increasingly subsidized by taxpayers. The real danger is more immediate: humans surrendering consequential decisions to technology that routinely fails, while its makers grow richer and more powerful either way.