Three years ago, I warned in these pages that the greatest existential threat to humanity might not emerge from a stray asteroid or a cosmic cataclysm but from uncontrolled artificial intelligence (AI). Today, the trajectory towards an AI Armageddon has not merely accelerated, it has violently careered off the rails of human oversight. The academic debates of previous years regarding a voluntary six-month pause in AI development have been buried under an avalanche of hyper-autonomous, unaligned...