We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new
essay on why the AI industry
should slow down. Machine-made mimicry
is doing what once only bards could do,
and threatens now to copy Alexander too,
slicing knots and weeping when the sea-
encircled world turns king to retiree
and sends him, sad and drunk and weeping, through
the desert back to verdant Babylon,
there to drink himself to fevered death.
What is a conquering god if not a looter,
jumped-up with greed: each pharaoh, tsar, or khan—
his want for want itself his shibboleth;
he’s not a man, even if he’s computer.