Thank you to the AI safety people

I was born at the end of the cold war, unaware of the danger we were emerging from. Duck and cover drills (as if those could protect schoolchildren from a nuclear blast) were a curiosity of the past. The farmer-poet Wendell Berry, who wrote about the dread of nuclear war, died recently. From his 1968 “The peace of wild things”: When despair for the world grows in meand I wake in the night at the least soundin fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,I go and lie down where the wood drakerests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.I come into the peace of wild thingswho do not tax their lives with forethoughtof grief. Mid-20th-century fallout shelter, Massachusetts I’m so grateful for the generations of people who worked hard to lower our risk from nuclear war. There’s no way to know how close we came to disaster. I’m grateful for the planning, the research, the negotiation, the recognition of common interests, the swallowing of pride. Humanity had built…