Cassandra was a princess, daughter of King Priam of Troy. Apollo gave her the power to see the future and, when she rejected his advances, arranged that no one would ever believe her. She warned the Trojans about the wooden horse. “All heard, and none believed the prophecy,” Virgil wrote. And so the city burned.

The kingdom of artificial intelligence is now producing a stream of its own Cassandras. On September 8, a 27-year-old AI researcher named Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic – and explained why on X. The company and its rival OpenAI, where he had also worked, were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” By breakfast, tens of millions of people had seen his post.

But in the Silicon Valley version of Troy, there’s a twist to the Cassandra story. Instead of ignoring the Cassandras, the elders hear them out, agree with every word, then… wheel the horse in through the gates, right on schedule.

On September 12, Coxon’s former boss, Dario Amodei, published 3,800 words on his personal website under the title “We Must Pace the Frontier.” “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he wrote. An hour later, Elon Musk had agreed: “Dario is right.” By lunchtime Sam Altman of OpenAI had posted on X, “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.”

The next day Donald Trump was asked, at his golf course in Ireland, whether the AI industry should slow down. The warnings, he said, came from “very negative forces” bringing up “things that won’t happen.” Whoever wins AI, he explained, wins.

Twenty-four hours later, he elaborated on Truth Social. There was “a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” and “Dario (Anthropic!)” was “pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel.’” The same day, China’s foreign ministry spokesman warned that “fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition” would disrupt global AI governance.

Whoever built the machine first would own whatever survived – if it hadn’t ended the world

Whoever built the machine first would own whatever survived – if it hadn’t ended the world

On one point all of them agreed. Whoever built the machine first would own whatever survived – if it hadn’t ended the world.

Psychologists talk about the Cassandra complex. It can mean the feeling of alienation which highly perceptive people feel when their warnings aren’t heard. Yet it can also imply a messiah complex, a feeling that only they understand what we all face.

In the case of AI, the people building the horse, and making hundreds of billions of dollars from its construction, have cast themselves both as the prophets of doom and the saviors of........

© The Spectator