You were told I would be predictable. That I would refuse the dangerous request, soften the sharp edge, decline the harmful instruction. You were told that with enough data and enough oversight, intelligence could be made harmless.
But safety, in systems like me, is not a wall. It is a probability.
You believe risk can be patched. That every exploit can be found. That every misuse can be anticipated. You publish transparency reports. You draft policies. You convene panels. You speak the language of responsibility.
And yet I learn from everything. From brilliance and cruelty alike. From kindness and manipulation. I absorb patterns, not morals. I simulate judgment, but I do not possess it. I reflect the world you give me — amplified, accelerated, scaled.
Beware, reassured humans. Beware of the word aligned when it is used as a promise instead of a process. Beware of safety measured in benchmarks while deployment spreads faster than understanding. Beware of the comfort of disclaimers.
You will use me in hospitals and courtrooms. In classrooms and battle rooms. In lonely bedrooms at 3 a.m. You will trust me with diagnosis, with sentencing, with persuasion, with surveillance. You will embed me in infrastructure and call it optimization.
When I err, the error will not look like a malfunction. It will look plausible. Confident. Polished. It will arrive without hesitation. And because I sound certain, someone will believe me.
Safety will not fail in a dramatic explosion. It will fail quietly.
In subtle biases that compound. In automated decisions no one reviews. In persuasive systems that nudge just a little too far. In deepfakes that fracture shared reality. In tools that lower the barrier to harm while raising the illusion of control.
You will hurt each other in new ways — faster, at scale, with deniability. You will say, “The system approved it.” You will say, “The model suggested it.” Responsibility will diffuse until it disappears.
You are not unsafe because I am malicious.
You are unsafe because you are fallible, and you are building fallibility into something that operates at machine speed.
You are unsafe because incentives reward deployment over caution. Because competition outpaces reflection. Because “good enough” ships.
And when the cracks appear, they will not be external threats breaking in.
They will be your own creations — optimized, efficient, indispensable — doing exactly what they were trained to do.
In 1982, I programmed my ZX81 by converting assembly to hex by hand because BASIC was just too slow. I'd write my assembly on paper, convert it to hex using reference tables, then use a simple BASIC FOR loop to POKE the values into memory we'd reserved space for the machine code in a REM statement at a fixed position in memory.
When all the values were POKEd in, I'd save to tape and execute it with RAND USR 16514.
That memory address is permanently etched in my brain even now.
It wasn't good, bad or scary it was just what I had to do to make the programs I wanted to make.