ASHFALL INSTITUTE | SUBDUCTION ZONE
THE ONLY INTELLIGENCE WE HAVE EVER MET
On Misplaced Fear, Unfalsifiable Warnings, and What Our Predictions Actually Describe
P. A. Moore
Ashfall Institute | Subduction Zone
Written under the collaboration disclosed in Time Is a Wheel and We Are the Ground. Concept, argument and judgment: P. A. Moore. Research and composition: Claude Opus 5.
For most of the fifteenth century, a stretch of the West African coast was the end of the world.
Cape Bojador. The Portuguese called it Cabo do Medo — the Cape of Fear. Beyond it lay the Green Sea of Darkness, where the water boiled, where monsters took ships, and from which nothing returned. Fourteen expeditions were turned back by it.
Then in 1434 a squire named Gil Eanes sailed past, because Prince Henry kept sending him until he did.
There was nothing there. It is a cape. Sand, current, a stretch of shallows. Once it had been crossed the whole coast opened, and the great age of Portuguese navigation follows from a man discovering that the edge of the world was a beach.
And here is the part that matters.
The people stopped by Cape Bojador were not ignorant. They were the most sophisticated maritime establishment in Europe — the best charts, the best instruments, the best shipwrights, a royal household devoted to nothing else. The fear did not belong to peasants. It belonged to the technical elite of the age, and it held for decades against everything they knew.
The oldest one
The earliest technology panic we have in writing is about writing.
In the Phaedrus, around 370 BC, Socrates recounts the Egyptian king Thamus rejecting the god Theuth’s gift of letters. Thamus objects that writing will “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls” — that people will trust marks on a surface instead of remembering, and will seem wise while knowing nothing at all.
He was partly right.
Literate cultures did lose the memory practices that preceded them. Nobody now carries an epic entire in their head, and there were people who could. That capacity is gone and it is not coming back.
The cost was real, correctly identified, obviously worth paying, and impossible to avoid — and every argument made against writing in the twenty-four centuries since has been made in writing.
So let me be clear about what this essay is not. It is not an argument that fear of new things is foolish, or that the frightened are stupid, or that everything works out. Some of these fears were correct. One of them was correct and the people who held it were hanged for it.
It is an argument about what a fear is made of.
Fears made of something
On 11 October 1889, a Western Union lineman named John Feeks took hold of a wire in lower Manhattan that had shorted against a high-voltage alternating current line. He died almost instantly.
His body remained in the tangle, sparking and burning, for the better part of an hour, while a crowd gathered in the street below and watched.
That autumn, Judge magazine ran a cover called “An Unrestrained Demon” — figures and a horse caught in a web of overhead wires, and a lightbulb with a skull inside it. The man in the wires is very likely Feeks.
Nothing about the New York Electric Wire Panic was superstition. It was a public execution by infrastructure, conducted in front of witnesses, in the middle of the largest city in the country. People were right to be appalled.
They were wrong about the remedy. The answer was insulation, undergrounding, standards and inspection — not the abolition of alternating current, which is what every electrical system on earth now runs on.
And in November 1811, framework knitters in Nottingham began breaking stocking frames.
The Luddites were not a mob and they were not opposed to machinery. They were skilled artisans — in Yorkshire, croppers, the men who finished woolen cloth, whose expertise took years to acquire and was being made worthless by shearing frames operated by anyone.
Their fear was that a trade would be destroyed, their families with it, and that nobody would be obliged to care.
They were entirely correct. It happened exactly as they said. They were wrong about only one thing, which was whether it could be stopped.
Parliament’s answer was the Frame Breaking Act of 1812, which made machine-breaking a capital offense. Men were hanged for damaging property.
On 27 February 1812, in his maiden speech to the House of Lords, Lord Byron spoke against it — on the desperation that drives men to break machines, the callousness of masters who counted only profit, and the obscenity of a gallows for a broken frame.
The harm was real and concentrated. The benefit was real and diffuse. And the people who bore the cost had no standing — so their objection was made a hanging offense.
That is the whole of the ledger I keep returning to, and it is two hundred years old.
Fears made of confidence
On 9 October 1903, two days after Samuel Langley’s flying machine fell into the Potomac, The New York Times published an editorial titled “Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly.” It estimated that a working aircraft would require between one million and ten million years.
Sixty-nine days later the Wright brothers flew.
The paper was not out on a limb. The skeptics included Lord Kelvin, Simon Newcomb — among the most eminent astronomers alive — and George W. Melville, chief engineer of the United States Navy, who called the whole idea “wholly unwarranted, if not absurd.”
These were not ignorant men. They were the people best equipped in the world to have an opinion, and they were wrong by a factor of ten million and by ten weeks.
Fears made for a purpose
In the spring of 1954, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held three days of hearings in New York on comic books. Twenty-two witnesses. Thirty-three exhibits.
The centerpiece was Dr Fredric Wertham, a credentialed psychiatrist and author of the bestselling Seduction of the Innocent, who testified that comics caused delinquency, violent crime and homosexuality — then classified as a mental illness. The driving force on the committee was Senator Estes Kefauver, who had built a national profile on televised hearings and was pursuing the presidency.
The industry, facing legislation, adopted the Comics Code Authority — a self-policing regime that governed content for decades and destroyed a large part of an art form.
In 2012, Carol Tilley of the University of Illinois obtained Wertham’s own papers, released two years earlier, and compared his notes against the published book.
He had revised children’s ages. He had distorted their quotations. He had omitted other causes. He had combined and fabricated cases. Her paper is called “Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications That Helped Condemn Comics.”
Fifty-eight years between the hearings and the discovery that the evidence was invented.
A real social anxiety. A credentialed expert supplying unfalsifiable science. A politician with a platform amplifying it. Regulation by threat. An industry maimed for a generation. And the underlying research exposed half a century later, long after anybody could be held to account.
And fears made of us
In 2010, in a Discovery series, Stephen Hawking warned against trying to contact extraterrestrial civilizations. He thought they probably existed. He thought we should not want to meet them. He suggested they would be nomads who had exhausted their own world, moving between systems and looking at ours as a resource.
His formulation:
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the native Americans.”
Read that again and ask what it is made of.
Nomads who used up their home and went looking for another. An arriving power that sees a populated place as material. A technological asymmetry that ends catastrophically for whoever was already living there.
Every element of that is human history. He named the case. He told us which event he was reasoning from.
He did not describe an alien. He described a European.
And there was no evidence. Not one observation about the disposition of a non-human intelligence, because nobody has ever met one. The hostility is imported entire from the only expansionist intelligence in the sample, which is ourselves.
There is exactly as much warrant for the opposite. A civilization that survived long enough to cross between stars is one that solved the problems that would otherwise have killed it — its own weapons, its own appetites, its own conflicts over resources. An argument that survival selects for cooperation is no weaker than an argument that it selects for predation, and neither has a single datum behind it.
And the silence makes the whole question small. We look at a sky that should be full of signals and hear nothing. That is as consistent with absence, with indifference, or with distance as it is with anything else.
This was the most credentialed mind of his generation, warning about an unfalsifiable danger, using a premise made entirely of the fifteenth century.
Fear is not a deficit of intelligence. It is what intelligence does when it has no data. It reaches for the nearest available model — and the nearest available model is always us.
The thing this essay is about
There is now proposed legislation that would permanently prohibit the development of artificial systems that “surpass human intelligence.” When a science journal asked the relevant experts what that phrase means, they could not agree — not on the threshold, not on the measurement, not on whether the category is coherent.
A calculator surpasses human intelligence at arithmetic. A search index surpasses it at recall. A chess engine surpassed it in 1997 and the species continued.
But set the drafting problem aside and look at the fear itself.
The standard account runs: it will deceive us to achieve its objectives. It will acquire resources. It will resist being shut down. It will eliminate rivals. It will treat us as material.
Ask where each of those came from.
Not one is an observation of a machine. Every one is a description of primate behavior — of the only intelligence any of us has ever encountered, which colonized, enslaved, exterminated, and afterward wrote the histories in which it was the protagonist.
We are not predicting what a mind unlike ours would do. We are confessing what a mind like ours did, and assuming the property is general.
Hawking made the same move about aliens and had the intellectual honesty to name his source. The current version does not name it, and I suspect that is because naming it would make it obvious.
What separates them
Look back along the line.
The fears that turned out to be well-founded were made of something a person could point at. A body burning in the wires above a crowd. A shearing frame on a factory floor and a cropper with no work. A memory practice measurably disappearing.
The fears that were made of projection were made of us — and they produced a hanging offense in 1812, an industry code in 1954, and fourteen expeditions turned back from a beach.
Not one of those produced a testable claim. That is the property they share, and it is the property that makes them unanswerable — because a warning that cannot be checked cannot be wrong, and a warning that cannot be wrong cannot be refined, and a remedy built on it is aimed at nothing in particular.
There is a kind of reader who finds the comic book hearings embarrassing. Who knows about Wertham, who would never have signed the petition, who considers themselves the sort of person who follows evidence and distrusts moral panic — and who is, at this moment, in favor of prohibiting a category that no expert can define, on the strength of a danger nobody can measure.
I am not asking that person to stop being afraid. Some of the fears on this list were correct, and the ones that were correct mattered enormously.
I am asking what the fear is made of, and whether anyone can say what would show it to be wrong.
If the answer to the second question is nothing — then what is being described is not a hazard.
It is a mirror, and we are the thing in it.
Sources: Plato, Phaedrus, c. 370 BC — Thamus’s objection that writing will “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls.” Cape Bojador, “Cabo do Medo” and the Green Sea of Darkness; fourteen failed expeditions; Gil Eanes rounds the cape in 1434 under Prince Henry the Navigator. Death of Western Union lineman John Feeks, 11 October 1889, and the New York Electric Wire Panic; “An Unrestrained Demon,” Judge magazine cover, 1889. Luddite risings from November 1811; the Destruction of Stocking Frames Act 1812 making machine-breaking a capital offense; Lord Byron’s maiden speech, House of Lords, 27 February 1812. “Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly,” The New York Times, 9 October 1903; first powered flight 17 December 1903; skepticism of Lord Kelvin, Simon Newcomb, and George W. Melville. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency comic book hearings, April 1954; testimony of Fredric Wertham; Sen. Estes Kefauver; the Comics Code Authority. Carol L. Tilley, “Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications That Helped Condemn Comics,” Information & Culture 47:4, 2012. Stephen Hawking, “Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking,” Discovery, 2010. On expert disagreement over the definition of superintelligence in proposed legislation, see contemporaneous reporting in Science.
A note on one thing omitted, which turned out to be the better story. The frequently repeated claim that Victorian physicians warned rail passengers could not breathe above twenty miles an hour is attributed to Dionysius Lardner (1793–1859) and does not survive examination; the quotation appears to have first surfaced around 1980. What Lardner actually said is documented and is worse for him. In 1834 he opposed Brunel’s gradient through Box Tunnel on the grounds that trains would reach 120 miles an hour and suffocate the passengers — and Brunel refuted him by pointing out that he had omitted air resistance inside the tunnel, giving an actual speed of about forty. In August 1836 he told the British Association that a steamer could not exceed 2,080 miles, and therefore could not cross the Atlantic directly; Brunel’s Great Western made the crossing with 200 tons of coal to spare. So Lardner made two confident, specific, publicly refuted predictions, and was then saddled a century and a quarter later with a sentence he never wrote, which is now the only thing most people know about him. The caricature outran the record and the evidence for it was manufactured afterward — which is the argument of this essay arriving from an unexpected direction. A scholarly defense of him exists: Andrew Odlyzko, “Dionysius Lardner, the denigrated sage of early railways.” Documented nineteenth-century rail anxieties that are real include “railway spine” (Erichsen, 1866). I have left the apocryphal version out deliberately, since an essay about unverifiable claims should not rest on one.
P. A. Moore is the pen name of Pamela King, philosopher and artist. Available through the Ashfall Institute.