The world chose the blue pill. I chose the red one.

There’s a movie everyone’s seen. At one point, you’re offered a choice between two pills: the blue pill, which takes you back to a comfortable illusion, and the red pill, which shows you the world as it really is.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, most of the world has already chosen the blue pill. They’re told everything will be fine, that speed justifies it all, that questioning it means you don’t understand progress. And they carry on, untroubled.

I chose the other one.

I don’t have an answer no one else has. I have a habit of looking where almost no one else looks: at the geopolitics driving this race, the culture swallowing it whole, the institutions that always arrive too late to establish even the most basic, commonsense framework. Connect those dots, and something comes into view that you can’t see up close. Almost no one is looking at the whole picture. Most people see only the pieces. What’s right in front of them.

The very people developing this technology have already said it out loud, in front of the world. They talk about a real risk of this ending badly. They talk about life-or-death decisions being handed over to systems no one fully understands. We hear it. We quote it in an article. And we go back to taking the blue pill, every day, knowing we’re making a choice but making it anyway, as if the message had been the opposite: everything will be fine.

When something smells like shit, we all look for the source. When we find it, we say it’s not that bad. And when it becomes too obvious to ignore, we lower our eyes and pretend it isn’t there. Sinister. Absurd. Appalling. Akrasia.

Lifting your head and seeing clearly comes with a responsibility you can’t hand back. Once you understand what’s at stake, looking away is no longer just irresponsible. It’s immoral.

This isn’t a fear campaign. It’s a campaign for open eyes. It asks you to face what’s already being said out loud, instead of believing whatever makes you most comfortable.

The world chose the blue pill. I chose the red one. And you? Will you keep acting against your better judgment?

Kill this AI.

Juanca Santiago