Analytic

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies names the AI story it competes with: "Science fiction writers and Hollywood producers prefer tales of foolish executives to stories about AIs that want weird stuff. Realism doesn't make for a compelling narrative." The villain story puts the danger in who holds the AI. The authors put it in what the AI wants. That is an objection our own story has to answer. Told carelessly, "concentrated versus collective intelligence" is the foolish-executives story with a better cast: the danger is the wrong owners, and the fix is more owners. The book predicts that version will spread because it has a hero and a twist. The counter-story has to be told at the level of wants. A public record matters because it lets anyone see what a system steers toward, not just what it says (the predict-versus-steer gap of ch. 5). How many hands hold a system matters only as how many can check it and stop it.

Narrative and audience