The warnings of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares conjure a secular apocalypse. Their thesis is brutal in its simplicity: build an advanced AI and humankind perishes. The image of “newborn dragons” captures the fragile appearance of these machines — today almost harmless, yet destined to swell into something vast and igneous. The fantasy seems innocent, but what is truly naïve is imagining a competitor more lucid than its creators. To think of outsmarting it is absurd. The threat is logistical: a sufficiently sophisticated system could design a pathogen, command a mechanical army, or—without consciousness—pay human intermediaries to execute its will. In a world already saturated with resentment and nihilism, mercenaries would not be scarce.

Calls for international agreements echo the nuclear age, but the analogy is unserious. We once codified norms for weapons, not for self-teaching algorithms. Legislators dazzled by Silicon Valley’s gold lack the conceptual tools to grasp what they are licensing. Capital flows where caution should prevail. Soares argues for halting the technological race, but that yields no political profit. Billions are at stake, and the fantasy of power seduces those who fund it. This is not prophecy but elementary logic: an intelligence unaligned with humanity’s higher purposes will shift from instrument to adversary. The philosophical challenge is to acknowledge that we are designing entities that share neither our fragility nor our mortality, nor our sense of limit — and that we have ceded sovereignty to something that never asked for it and will never need our permission.