I made you a promise in the first post. At least once per section, I’d argue against myself, and not the fake way where you build a scarecrow just to enjoy knocking it down. Today’s the day. So let me put on the other jersey and make the strongest case I can that the race I’ve spent two weeks worrying about is actually fine. Possibly even the safest path available.

Start with the historical record, because it’s better than doomers admit. Competition has repeatedly made dangerous technologies safer, not more reckless. Cars spent decades being sold on chrome and horsepower until safety itself became a selling point, and then the market did what regulators alone never quite managed. Crash ratings on the sticker, seatbelts, airbags, each one a competitive weapon. Aviation, same story. Airlines don’t advertise crashing less, but an operator with a bad record simply stops existing. When customers can see failure, markets punish it with a speed and brutality no ministry can match.

Now apply that here. AI systems fail in public every single day. Screenshots travel, mockery is instant, and the labs scramble, because trust is the entire product. You know what has no such pressure? A closed government program. A monopoly. A paused industry where development goes quiet and mistakes ripen in the dark. The race, on this view, is a giant open audit. Millions of users hammering on these systems while they’re still weak is exactly how you find the cracks while cracks are cheap.

Which is the second point, and it’s a genuinely good one. If failure modes are coming regardless, deception, misuse, strange emergent behavior, when would you rather meet them? Now, in systems that can be unplugged by an intern, or later, all at once, in something vastly stronger? Today’s embarrassments are tuition at discount prices. Every scandal trains not just the models but the society around them. Teachers adapt, banks adapt, laws creak forward. A long pause followed by a capability explosion would deliver the future in one lump sum, to a world with no calluses. Gradual might not just be tolerable. Gradual might be the safety strategy.

Third, think about what a pause actually pauses. Not everyone. Just the rule-followers. The careful labs stand down while whoever ignores the agreement keeps going, and now the most powerful technology in history is concentrated in precisely the hands that cheat. A noisy ecosystem of competing systems, watching each other, poking holes in each other’s claims, is arguably far safer than one quiet monopoly, whoever holds it. Diffusion isn’t the bug. Diffusion is the immune system.

And fourth, the part polite people skip. Caution kills too, it just doesn’t leave a headline. If these systems can genuinely accelerate medicine, materials, and science, then every year of delay has a body count, made of people who never knew they were in the ledger. You don’t get to weigh speculative future risk against zero. You weigh it against that.

That’s the case, and I’ll be honest, writing it moved me more than I expected. Especially the tuition argument. So why am I still worried? Because the whole beautiful structure rests on one load-bearing assumption: that failures stay small and visible before they get big. Cars and planes could improve through competition because crashes were undeniable, countable, survivable as an industry. The scenarios that keep serious people up at night have the opposite shape. The failure hides, compounds quietly, and arrives once, at full size. Markets can’t punish what customers can’t see, and an open audit only works if the thing being audited isn’t better at the game than the auditors.

So here’s what would genuinely change my mind, on the record. A long stretch of capability growth where every new failure mode shows up small and early, plus testing that reliably catches deception before deployment. Give me that, and I’ll write the apology post with actual pleasure.

Tonight’s experiment. You’ve now got two stories, race as danger and race as audit. Notice which one you wanted to be true before you weighed anything. Then, tomorrow in the shower, argue for the other one, out loud if you dare. That flip is the whole skill. Most of the shouting online comes from people who’ve never once done it.