The title of this series was a claim, and I’ve spent ninety posts trying to earn it. Here it is stated plainly for the last time. This was never a story about humans against machines. It was a story about humans arguing with each other about machines, at considerable volume, for the exact years in which something else was being decided.

Look at where the energy went. Whether these systems are conscious. Whether the people worried about them are cranks or the people building them are liars. Whether the risk is the distant one or the present one, an argument conducted mostly between people who agree about what should be done. Whether the whole thing is a bubble. Those arguments were not stupid and some of them were important, and they occupied the decade in which liability was not assigned, incidents were not reported, dependencies were not audited, and nobody built the institution that would have needed years of lead time. The arguing wasn’t a distraction from the story. It was the story, and the machines were the setting.

Now the part I have to say, because a series that ends on that note would be a cheap shot. Arguing is not the failure. Arguing is the only mechanism a species like ours has ever had for deciding anything at all. Everything good about the arrangements we live in came out of people shouting at each other for decades and eventually settling on something workable. The failure was never that we argued. It was what we argued about, and that we conducted the whole thing as though it were an entertainment rather than a decision.

So let me put my own position down without hedging, since I’ve asked you for that repeatedly and owe it in return. I think the drift is real and already running. I think the endings are closer together than their descriptions suggest, and that a handful of ordinary properties decide which one we get. I think the levers exist, that liability is the best of them, and that they aren’t being pulled for structural reasons rather than because anyone is villainous. I think the most likely outcome is neither catastrophe nor rescue but something comfortable, well-run, and quietly diminished, arriving so gradually that no one will be able to name the year. And I think, as yesterday’s post argued at length, that I could be wrong about all of it in a way I wouldn’t be able to see from here.

If you keep three things from ninety posts, keep these. Control is four conditions rather than one object, and they erode separately and silently. Your position in any arrangement is determined by what you can withhold, and nothing else has ever determined it. And the moves worth making are the boring ones that pay off in every scenario, which is why they’re the same moves whether I’m right or not.

I should say what this series was, honestly. It was one person’s argument, written from a position, with a thesis it needed to sustain, by someone who has told you exactly how that biases him. It was not journalism and not scholarship. The most useful thing it can do is not convince you. It’s to leave you with words for arrangements that don’t have names yet, so that when one forms near you, you notice it a few years earlier than you otherwise would. That’s the whole product. It’s smaller than ninety posts of confident prose implies, and it’s not nothing.

The thing I’d most like to be true is that this was all overblown, and the second thing I’d most like is that it wasn’t and enough people noticed in time. Those are the two good outcomes and they’re both available, and neither requires anyone to be heroic. They require the arguing to be about the right things, conducted by people who could name what would change their minds, in the years while it still matters. Which is now, and was also last year, and will also be next year, right up until the point where it wasn’t.

So, the last exercise, and it’s the one this whole series has been walking toward.

It’s 2046. You’re old enough for someone younger to ask you about now, and they will, because people always ask. They want to know what it was like when it was happening, and they’ll assume, the way we assume about every previous generation, that you knew. Then they’ll ask the real question, the one with no cruelty in it, which is what you did.

Answer it. Out loud, in an ordinary room, today. Not what you thought, not what you posted, not which side you were on. What you did in the arguing years. If the answer is nothing, that’s allowed and it’s what most people will say and there is no shame in it whatsoever. Just notice that you have the answer now, while it’s still a draft.