Thank you to the AI safety people

I was born at the end of the cold war, unaware of the danger we were emerging from. Duck and cover drills (as if those could protect schoolchildren from a nuclear blast) were a curiosity of the past.

The farmer-poet Wendell Berry, who wrote about the dread of nuclear war, died recently. From his 1968 “The peace of wild things”:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.

I’m so grateful for the generations of people who worked hard to lower our risk from nuclear war. There’s no way to know how close we came to disaster. I’m grateful for the planning, the research, the negotiation, the recognition of common interests, the swallowing of pride. Humanity had built something that could overmaster us all, but people of many countries worked for decades to keep it in check.

And now we’re again building something with great gleaming promise, and also with monstrous potential. As AI development speeds up, I’m afraid for my children, as Wendell Berry was afraid for his.

A lot of people are working hard to help humanity thread the needle. They’re researchers, writers, and policy people. They’re running payroll and conferences and all the other moving parts. They disagree about a lot of things, but they’re willing to work together on a problem bigger than their differences.

I have so much respect and gratitude for all the people working on this, in their different ways. Thank you.

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*I don’t know what it’s like to be a wood drake or a heron.