Most scary ideas are easy to dismiss. You can walk away from a horror movie. You can shrug off a conspiracy theory. But this?
The moment you hear about it, it owns a piece of your brain. It doesn’t need to be real to feel like a problem. Just knowing it exists is enough to make you wonder, What if? And that’s the trap.
It’s a fear with no escape. If you take it seriously, there are only two options—either you help create the AI, just in case, or you risk punishment for doing nothing. Even though there’s no proof that this AI will ever exist, even though the logic behind it is full of holes, the idea lingers. It’s a mental itch you can’t quite scratch.
And for some people, that was enough to cause genuine panic