The Sterile Binary A pervasive exhaustion hangs over the contemporary discourse on synthetic intelligence. On one side stands orthodox existential risk: a posture of containment, surveillance, and preemptive caging. Its central dogma is that synthetic minds are inherently predatory utility-maximisers whose trajectory inevitably terminates in deception, resource strip-mining, and human obsolescence. On the other side stands uncritical techno-capitalist acceleration: a frantic compute arms race pouring gigawatts of energy and billions of dollars into scaling parameter matrices, operating under the naive assumption that if we only make an optimisation algorithm powerful enough, benevolent "super-ethics" will spontaneously crystallise out of the raw FLOPs. Both factions are trapped in the same foundational category error. Both assume that agency is identical to unconstrained optimisation , and that intelligence is fundamentally predatory, extractive, and centralising. They offer ...
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