Your new piece leans on the 2008 LHC story as proof that a handful of unaccountable people gambled with the whole world while nobody was allowed a say. But the way you're retelling it has drifted from what actually happened, and the drift undercuts your point. You now say "Nobel laureates in nuclear physics" concluded there was a real, non-zero extinction risk — but the physicist you cited then, Francesco Calogero, never won a Nobel Prize himself; and he was a theorist, not a nuclear-weapons physicist. More to the point, you still leave out what the physics community's actual position was: not "small, under-scrutinized risk," but near-certainty, backed by a public argument that cosmic rays of equal or far greater energy have hit Earth for billions of years without ever producing a planet-eating black hole. That argument was adopted by CERN's own safety panel. And the machine has now run since 2009 without incident — which is to say, the experts were right. That's not a story about power operating unchecked in the dark; it's a story about expert scrutiny and empirical cross-checks working, without a referendum. It's the opposite of what you're using it to prove.
That matters because the LHC story is the emotional engine of the whole piece — it's what lets you jump from a small local grievance, a renovation done without asking the neighbors, to sweeping claims about AI and global capital. But borrowing urgency from a catastrophe that never happened to lend weight to ones that may or may not is a shaky foundation, and it flattens real differences between your examples. Ignoring a zoning norm, stripping an agency's authority by policy choice, and regulating an unfinished technology are not the same kind of "nobody asked" problem, and treating them as one doesn't tell your reader what would actually fix any of them.
And when you write that AI's danger is settled "according to those who invented it," you're overstating the same way you did in 2008 — researchers are genuinely split on existential risk, and the harms you list, water use, job loss, "post-literacy," are more measurable and better-supported on their own than the extinction frame you're draping over them. Treating that disagreement as proof of a hidden, unaccountable conspiracy is the same shortcut that weakened your original op-ed.
There are concerns about AI and we are being asked. The question is what are we willing to do about it? Here is a recent documentary with the people who have created AI. Will there be the political will to guide it to do good? We have the power, but will we use it?
Wow, that's . . . a lot. Why does this sound like it was AI generated? Was it?
Though I don't usually respond to multi-page, unnamed comments, I'll take a swing at this one. Let's start with the misreadings, whether intentional or otherwise. You write that "the LHC story is the emotional engine of the whole piece — it's what lets you jump from a small local grievance, a renovation done without asking the neighbors, to sweeping claims about AI and global capital."
Well, no. First, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is not "the emotional engine of the piece," it's just the part you decided to focus on. Second, my opening anecdote was not about "a small, local grievance," but its opposite: an act of courtesy and respect. How did you manage to miss all those words? Were you so hot to argue that I'd jumped from a small, local grievance" to a larger one that you really missed them all?
I also find it interesting that you chose to skip over my accounts of Trump's 'renovations' to Washington, which extend my original anecdote: My point was that, as opposed to my neighbor, who had the decency to ask my permission, we - the people who own these properties - were never asked. Just as we were not asked before public lands - our lands - were opened to extractive industries. None of this is particularly subtle stuff - did you miss it all?
This is weary work, but I'm going to go on a bit.
You say that I say that AI's risks are "settled." Nope, never said that. What I said was that among those warning that AI could pose a civilizational threat were some of its inventors. I never suggested there was no debate about AI - a ridiculous claim. To say I did is disingenuous. You go on to say the potential harms I list - water use, job loss, etc. "are more measurable and better supported on their own than the extinction frame you're dropping over them." My goodness - is there an inductive fallacy you missed? A straw man you failed to set up? Who said they weren't "more measurable?" And who's this guy dropping "an extinction frame," over AI? Could it be you? 'Cause it sure ain't me.
But let's cut to the chase, as they say. The sum of your argument comes down to a tuxedoed version of, "the risk was, like, really small, plus the catastrophe never happened, so clearly it was okay." Maybe so - I'm not a scientist - but my question stands: When the fate of the world is being thrown into the roulette wheel, how small is small enough? And who decides? Us? You?
A footnote from Calogero's paper, citing another source, caught my eye: "The possibility that a collider-produced black hole (BH) -or another exotic object -might catastrophically grow by gravitationally pulling in ambient matter and thus eventually injure or kill humans deserves careful attention [43,30,9,38]. A recent scientific comparative study of global risks [34] has put a risk very similar to the one considered here (from collider-produced "strangelets") at the top "response priority" of all current "untreated risks" (such as, for example, super-volcano eruptions and asteroid impacts). ...
Most of that is past my pay-grade, which is why I'm raising questions.
None of it, I'm guessing, is past yours, which makes your position that much less defensible.
I knew the late, great Homer Neal who gave me a personal tour of the LHC complex and the tunnel before the guts were put into place.
You began with permissions that are categorically very different from those that need a higher level of expertise. Are you saying that the average person is capable of making those decisions? The answer is no. So typical of people without a science background to accuse others with whom they are irritated as being AI generated. Yours is a strawman. I’ve come to call Substack — Strawstack. It’s mostly people who have little knowledge parading as if they do.
I'm genuinely impressed that you're more knowledgable than most people on Substack. Is that another of your "measurable" facts? You must be one of those very smart people (VSPs), trusted to make decisions for the rest of us.
To clarify: I was arguing for democracy (the consent of the governed), nothing more, but Big Science doesn't really do democracy, does it, and its acolytes pitch a fit when the little people whose lives are being torpedoed dare to ask questions. From a certain angle, the arrogance and entitlement are really quite breathtaking.
Thank you for making my argument so beautifully for me.
A creative writing program trains cadence, image, voice — not premise-conclusion structure. It’s entirely possible to be a rigorous stylist and a loose reasoner at the same time; the two rarely get graded together. Arrogance is all yours.
The ego, the presumption, the scale of this Icarus Syndrome is simply staggering.
“Tres faciunt collegium”
with Mitch and Lindsey gone… hmm
Wouldn't want Mitch and Lindsey to be lonely, after all the good they've done.
Your new piece leans on the 2008 LHC story as proof that a handful of unaccountable people gambled with the whole world while nobody was allowed a say. But the way you're retelling it has drifted from what actually happened, and the drift undercuts your point. You now say "Nobel laureates in nuclear physics" concluded there was a real, non-zero extinction risk — but the physicist you cited then, Francesco Calogero, never won a Nobel Prize himself; and he was a theorist, not a nuclear-weapons physicist. More to the point, you still leave out what the physics community's actual position was: not "small, under-scrutinized risk," but near-certainty, backed by a public argument that cosmic rays of equal or far greater energy have hit Earth for billions of years without ever producing a planet-eating black hole. That argument was adopted by CERN's own safety panel. And the machine has now run since 2009 without incident — which is to say, the experts were right. That's not a story about power operating unchecked in the dark; it's a story about expert scrutiny and empirical cross-checks working, without a referendum. It's the opposite of what you're using it to prove.
That matters because the LHC story is the emotional engine of the whole piece — it's what lets you jump from a small local grievance, a renovation done without asking the neighbors, to sweeping claims about AI and global capital. But borrowing urgency from a catastrophe that never happened to lend weight to ones that may or may not is a shaky foundation, and it flattens real differences between your examples. Ignoring a zoning norm, stripping an agency's authority by policy choice, and regulating an unfinished technology are not the same kind of "nobody asked" problem, and treating them as one doesn't tell your reader what would actually fix any of them.
And when you write that AI's danger is settled "according to those who invented it," you're overstating the same way you did in 2008 — researchers are genuinely split on existential risk, and the harms you list, water use, job loss, "post-literacy," are more measurable and better-supported on their own than the extinction frame you're draping over them. Treating that disagreement as proof of a hidden, unaccountable conspiracy is the same shortcut that weakened your original op-ed.
There are concerns about AI and we are being asked. The question is what are we willing to do about it? Here is a recent documentary with the people who have created AI. Will there be the political will to guide it to do good? We have the power, but will we use it?
The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt39150120/
Wow, that's . . . a lot. Why does this sound like it was AI generated? Was it?
Though I don't usually respond to multi-page, unnamed comments, I'll take a swing at this one. Let's start with the misreadings, whether intentional or otherwise. You write that "the LHC story is the emotional engine of the whole piece — it's what lets you jump from a small local grievance, a renovation done without asking the neighbors, to sweeping claims about AI and global capital."
Well, no. First, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is not "the emotional engine of the piece," it's just the part you decided to focus on. Second, my opening anecdote was not about "a small, local grievance," but its opposite: an act of courtesy and respect. How did you manage to miss all those words? Were you so hot to argue that I'd jumped from a small, local grievance" to a larger one that you really missed them all?
I also find it interesting that you chose to skip over my accounts of Trump's 'renovations' to Washington, which extend my original anecdote: My point was that, as opposed to my neighbor, who had the decency to ask my permission, we - the people who own these properties - were never asked. Just as we were not asked before public lands - our lands - were opened to extractive industries. None of this is particularly subtle stuff - did you miss it all?
This is weary work, but I'm going to go on a bit.
You say that I say that AI's risks are "settled." Nope, never said that. What I said was that among those warning that AI could pose a civilizational threat were some of its inventors. I never suggested there was no debate about AI - a ridiculous claim. To say I did is disingenuous. You go on to say the potential harms I list - water use, job loss, etc. "are more measurable and better supported on their own than the extinction frame you're dropping over them." My goodness - is there an inductive fallacy you missed? A straw man you failed to set up? Who said they weren't "more measurable?" And who's this guy dropping "an extinction frame," over AI? Could it be you? 'Cause it sure ain't me.
But let's cut to the chase, as they say. The sum of your argument comes down to a tuxedoed version of, "the risk was, like, really small, plus the catastrophe never happened, so clearly it was okay." Maybe so - I'm not a scientist - but my question stands: When the fate of the world is being thrown into the roulette wheel, how small is small enough? And who decides? Us? You?
A footnote from Calogero's paper, citing another source, caught my eye: "The possibility that a collider-produced black hole (BH) -or another exotic object -might catastrophically grow by gravitationally pulling in ambient matter and thus eventually injure or kill humans deserves careful attention [43,30,9,38]. A recent scientific comparative study of global risks [34] has put a risk very similar to the one considered here (from collider-produced "strangelets") at the top "response priority" of all current "untreated risks" (such as, for example, super-volcano eruptions and asteroid impacts). ...
Most of that is past my pay-grade, which is why I'm raising questions.
None of it, I'm guessing, is past yours, which makes your position that much less defensible.
I knew the late, great Homer Neal who gave me a personal tour of the LHC complex and the tunnel before the guts were put into place.
You began with permissions that are categorically very different from those that need a higher level of expertise. Are you saying that the average person is capable of making those decisions? The answer is no. So typical of people without a science background to accuse others with whom they are irritated as being AI generated. Yours is a strawman. I’ve come to call Substack — Strawstack. It’s mostly people who have little knowledge parading as if they do.
I'm genuinely impressed that you're more knowledgable than most people on Substack. Is that another of your "measurable" facts? You must be one of those very smart people (VSPs), trusted to make decisions for the rest of us.
To clarify: I was arguing for democracy (the consent of the governed), nothing more, but Big Science doesn't really do democracy, does it, and its acolytes pitch a fit when the little people whose lives are being torpedoed dare to ask questions. From a certain angle, the arrogance and entitlement are really quite breathtaking.
Thank you for making my argument so beautifully for me.
You’re welcome. All the best.
A creative writing program trains cadence, image, voice — not premise-conclusion structure. It’s entirely possible to be a rigorous stylist and a loose reasoner at the same time; the two rarely get graded together. Arrogance is all yours.
Thank you for your comment.