I ran into a friend at a Palo Alto bar the other day. Horace is a lobbyist for the technology industry at the Pentagon, and I found him staring at his martini with the enthusiasm of a man whose Insta reel had gotten only two likes.

“What’s wrong, Horace?” I asked.

“It’s the computer boys out here in Silicon Valley,” he sighed. “They’ve gone and built a Death Brain that is going to wipe out humanity, and now they want Washington to do something about it.”

“That sounds quite serious,” I said. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. One of their top researchers, a young fella named Jacob, walked away from his unvested stock options just to warn everybody. In this town, we understand giving up on principles, but giving up stock options? That’s like a Labrador retriever running away from a fallen hot dog on the street.”

“What does the Death Brain do?”

“Right now, it mostly answers emails and writes bad poetry,” Horace said. “But the companies admitted that they have had to stop the computers from going off and designing biological weapons and nuclear missiles for no apparent reason. One of their CEOs, a chap named Dario, wrote a massive essay practically begging the government to force him to stop spending trillions of dollars on building it faster and faster.”

“That should be easy enough,” I said. “Congress loves stopping things.”

“It’s not that simple,” Horace groaned. “You see, there’s a catch. We asked the Chinese if they would also hit the brakes on their own humanity-destroying Death Brain. And Beijing said, ‘No thanks, losers.’”

“So, the Chinese are ignoring the warnings?”

“Exactly. And as any good geopolitical strategist will tell you, we cannot afford an Apocalypse Gap. If someone is going to build a machine that destroys the world, it must be America, not China. We have to do it first, just to preserve our competitive edge.”

“It makes perfect sense when you put it that way,” I nodded.

“Trump agrees,” Horace said, signaling the waiter for another drink. “A couple of years ago, he was terrified the computers were going to trick us into a nuclear holocaust and the robots were going to murder us in our beds. Apparently, he has had a change of heart.”

“He’s not worried about the Death Brain anymore?”

“Not at all. In fact, he declared the whole AI Apocalypse thing a hoax. The other day, a big shot was giving a big speech about computer chips on a stage, and Trump called him on speakerphone right in the middle of it. He told the crowd that the robots aren’t taking over. He said the Cassandras of doom are just playing into China’s hands.”

“So, what is his plan?”

“To sprint to the finish line,” Horace said. “He thinks that whoever wins the Death Brain race, wins the whole thing. He also said the only safety guardrail the world needs is a very smart, high-IQ president.”

“Well, it’s too bad Obama can’t run anymore,” I said. “So, what is your lobbying strategy going to be now?”

Horace sighed. “I’m heading up to Capitol Hill to make sure we don’t slow down the AI Frontier for a single second. The Frontier has to stay in front. If humanity is going to be wiped out by a giant calculator, we have to make goddamn sure it’s an American one. I am also hearing that Congress wants to spend five hundred billion dollars to stop the computers from wiping out the human race.”

“That seems like a prudent investment,” I said. “You can never be too careful with doomsday.”

“What’s wrong with you? It’s a complete waste of taxpayer money,” Horace replied, dropping his fork. “Why should we spend even a dime on stopping machines from doing something we are perfectly capable of doing to ourselves anyway?”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” I admitted.

“Look at our track record,” Horace said with a fierce pride in his voice. “We have enough nuclear warheads to turn the entire planet into a charcoal briquette by next Tuesday. And we built those using slide rules and rotary phones. We did all of that with just black coffee and good old-fashioned human paranoia.”

“So, we don’t need a Death Brain to kill ourselves?”

“No, we don’t. It’s an insult to our own incompetence. We have spent the last hundred years polluting the oceans, melting the ice caps, and fighting trillion-dollar wars over whose grandfather owned which square foot of sand. Now, if some Silicon Valley calculator thinks it can just waltz in and destroy the globe in an afternoon, it’s got another thing coming,” Horace fumed.

“It hardly seems fair,” I agreed. “What do you plan to tell the appropriations committee?”

“I will tell them we have to protect American jobs,” Horace said, signing the check. “The job of driving the human race into extinction must be left to humans. By humans, I mean Americans. It should be done the good old-fashioned way. By hardworking politicians and generals, not outsourced to a glorified thermostat.”

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Have a great weekend. Pip-pip and toodles.