The men selling the fear own the cure

They're not protecting your children. They're protecting their position

Keep a list of everyone who has told you, on camera, with the lighting just so, that artificial intelligence is coming for your children. Then keep a second list: who holds the licences, who wrote the safety framework, whose company is exempted by the rule they helped draft.

Read the two lists side by side. You will not find a conspiracy. You will find something far more reliable — a set of incentives that needs no meeting, leaves no document, and produces exactly the outcome a conspiracy would have had to work for.

Three men build the thing. The same three men tour the studios warning that the thing may end civilisation. They testify. They ask, with what looks like real anguish, to be regulated. Then the anchors take it from there, grave and paternal, asking what kind of world we are leaving our kids — and nobody in the chain ever has to say the quiet part, because the quiet part does the work on its own.