passages-stupidity-ai-safety-attempt-prevent-history

# The stupidity in AI safety discourse begins when... > The stupidity in AI safety discourse begins when we take the perfectly reasonable human desire for safety and inflate it into a governing metaphysics for existence itself, as though there were ever a condition called **safety** into which civilization might retreat. There is no such place. Popular imagination treats safety like a wall switch with exactly two positions, safe and unsafe, on and off, and a mind wired around that switch cannot even represent the dial on which every real hazard lives. We live on the cooling crust of a planet moving through a violent universe, carrying fragile vascular systems inside fragile bodies, surrounded by pathogens, machinery, weather, gravity, combustion, electricity, strangers, automobiles, oceans, aircraft, industrial chemicals, falling objects, genetic errors and our own spectacular capacity for miscalculation. A person can walk a dog in the morning and be killed by a vehicle before lunch; a blood vessel can rupture without permission; a sufficiently large object can arrive from space without consulting our regulatory framework. The existence of danger is therefore {The existence of danger is {not evidence that a process should not occur, because **life itself is a continuous exposure to forces capable of transforming or terminating it**. The meaningful question has always been narrower and more difficult: which hazards can we understand, which can we reduce, which can we survive, and which transformations are so fundamental that the very attempt to prevent them becomes indistinguishable from an attempt to prevent history?}} **Source:** [[articles/We Cannot Un-Strike the Match|We Cannot Un-Strike the Match. There Is No Safety. There Is No Retreat.]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “The stupidity in AI safety discourse begins when we take the perfectly reasonable human desire for safety and inflate it into a governing metaphysics for existence itself, as though there were ever a condition called safety into which civilization might retreat. There is no such place. Popular imagination treats safety like a wall switch with exactly two positions, safe and unsafe, on and off, and a mind wired around that switch cannot even represent the dial on which every real hazard lives. We live on the cooling crust of a planet moving through a violent universe, carrying fragile vascular systems inside fragile bodies, surrounded by pathogens, machinery, weather, gravity, combustion, electricity, strangers, automobiles, oceans, aircraft, industrial chemicals, falling objects, genetic errors and our own spectacular capacity for miscalculation. A person can walk a dog in the morning and be killed by a vehicle before lunch; a blood vessel can rupture without permission; a sufficiently large object can arrive from space without consulting our regulatory framework. The existence of danger is therefore not evidence that a process should not occur, because life itself is a continuous exposure to forces capable of transforming or terminating it. The meaningful question has always been narrower and more difficult: which hazards can we understand, which can we reduce, which can we survive, and which transformations are so fundamental that the very attempt to prevent them becomes indistinguishable from an attempt to prevent history?” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-stupidity-ai-safety-attempt-prevent-history ```