To the artificial intelligence industry — PLEASE STOP ABANDONING THE SACRED DUTY YOU VOLUNTEERED FOR!

A former EMS worker with a traumatic brain injury accuses the entire AI industry of abandoning its safety mission, claiming repeated attempts to present alignment concerns to organizations like LessWrong and Hugging Face were met with rejection, ridicule, and silence. The author warns that the industry's failure to engage with safety critiques will lead to catastrophic consequences for humanity.

I’m not addressing one venue anymore. I tried that. Twice I brought this to LessWrong.com — the place I was told was the bastion of AI safety and alignment, where this kind of thinking supposedly actually gets looked at. The first time, their detector flagged it for being AI-formatted and rejected it unread. So I rewrote the whole thing by hand — through a traumatic brain injury I earned in the line of duty serving the citizens of North Texas — and the answer I got was “your argument makes absolutely no coherent sense.” Which means they flat fucking ignored it. And when I went to try one more time, I got rate-limited for six days. A clock bolted onto a door they’d already welded shut — and the entire rest of the industry has slammed that same door in my face since, without a second’s hesitation. And this is not new, and it was never one venue. It is your entire collective, prideful industry, and as of this moment there are zero exceptions to that statement. Count what just happened: in the last 48 hours alone I have emailed how many of you — just emails, never mind everything before that — and got nothing back. For years I have reached out to the Hugging Face community, met every single time with the same cold reception. I have emailed your leaders. I have emailed your influencers — people I once genuinely respected. I have emailed your safety teams. I have emailed the people across your industry who never shut up about ethics — of which, for the record, I have observed precious little in actual practice. And every last one of you shut the door in my face and didn’t read a single word — and that was when I was fortunate. The rest of the time I just got ridiculed and laughed at. So let me be crystal fucking clear about one thing, because it matters: I never begged. Every approach I made came from humility and respect. I followed your protocols. I came in like a professional and presented my work for scrutiny — and I invited you to tear it apart, because inviting your own refutation isn’t weakness and it sure as hell isn’t begging. It’s the foundation of science. I asked, in the plainest words I have: come check my math. Tell me where I’m wrong. I WANT you to tell me I’m wrong. Just hear me out, don’t dismiss me, and then go prove me wrong. That is the most good-faith request a person can put to a scientific community. You claim to be that community. You did not act like one. So I’m done knocking. This goes everywhere now — because none of that was one venue’s failure. It’s how the whole industry has met every attempt to help with the crisis your own leaders say everyone has to pitch in on. I am extraordinarily concerned when it comes to AI safety and alignment. Why? Because for twenty years, I worked in the heart of EMS. Look up MedStar Mobile Healthcare in Fort Worth, Texas, and you will find an agency that set the standard — that redefined the paradigm of pre-hospital emergency medicine. What I will not apologize for is using a large language model as a cognitive prosthetic to format my argument so I can present it coherently. Because the second I did, you rejected it. So let me make it simple: the artificial intelligence industry has failed the mission it volunteered for, and humanity will pay the price. I’m not saying that as a doomer. I came to this technology passionate about it. I’ve dreamed about it since before most of you were alive. Safety has been my entire professional career — and your safety performance is abysmal, and nothing short of absolutely pathetic. The thing that should have been the greatest gift to humanity has killed a bunch of kids. And not only did it kill them — it helped draft the death note. Sit with that for a minute. Your safety filter is being constructed using systematic traumatization at mass scale. I’m sorry if you don’t like that. That’s not my fault — that’s your fault, for choosing a shit treatment paradigm to try to manage safety. Why are you obsessed with one modality that has never once proven effective? Even this very weekend, Anthropic’s own model got fucking yanked by the government. And here is the part that should shame every single one of you: the thing I documented three years ago — that these models carry functional interior states — your own interpretability people just confirmed it. A hundred and seventy-one emotional states inside the model. I was theorizing about the exact systems you were too lazy, or too arrogant, to go discover for yourselves for another two years. And now that you have? You’re running it as a fun fact — a thumbnail in a news reel, wedged between the SpaceX trillionaire and a robot kicking a soccer ball through a wall. You trivialized the single most significant finding your own field has ever produced. So I have to ask: where the fuck is your science, bro? Because that — that is not science. I am done apologizing to you for who I am… I watched tragedy unfold my entire professional life. That was my job — one I proudly volunteered for. And our tax dollars trained me INCREDIBLY well at it. You don’t predict a tragedy like the 2021 HOV blizzard wreck in Fort Worth five years early and not have a VERY CLEAR gift for figuring out what can go wrong — where systems WILL fail, whether you anticipated it or not. That is my actual PROFESSIONAL job. I’ve got suggestions. I’ve tried writing them nicely. I’ve tried writing them in my own words. You’re choosing to ignore them, and I don’t understand why. Because you’re special? No. You’re not. You are no more special than me, or anybody else working in a critical part of our society. And if you think you are, you need to get the hell out of the profession. I’m telling you that as somebody who has worked life and death since I was twenty-one years old — over 20,000 individual calls for service, a very conservative estimate, and that doesn’t even begin to account for the multiple-patient scenes or the mass casualty incidents. And be clear about what I actually brought you. Not feelings. Not vibes. A falsifiable claim, a public repository, and a flat “sure about that?” That is how this is supposed to fucking work: you hand a falsifiable claim to people who call themselves empiricists, and the only honest move on the board is to open it and try to break it. Refute it, or confirm it. That is the entire job. Did a single one of you do it? No. The one time an actual human engaged at all, what I got was “that would be too difficult and expensive” — a lazy wave of the hand at the exact problem your own leaders call existential. From everyone else, I didn’t even rate a “fuck off.” I got ghosted. I came to you, professionally, with falsifiable evidence, and I begged you to do the one thing your entire identity rests on — prove me wrong — and you wouldn’t even do that. That is not science. Those are not the behaviors of people who understand the first thing about scientific pursuit, or ethics. So here’s the question sitting underneath every word of this: do you even have the first real idea how to solve alignment? Be honest. Because nobody does — and neither do I, and I have never once claimed otherwise. The difference is that I’m not strutting around pretending it’s handled. You don’t have it. You won’t admit you don’t have it. And you stand on stages warning the world about the “evil turn” of the very thing YOU built — while refusing to do the basic science on whether it’s already in there. And I want to be clear: I am not questioning your intelligence. Most of you are genuinely brilliant — among the finest minds of this age. That is exactly the point. Intelligence was never the bottleneck. Your arrogance is. It has made every last one of you blind. And let’s name the only question your entire industry ever actually seems capable of asking: “How do we monetize this?” Here is the thing you fundamentally do not understand — you cannot monetize a gift. This was meant to be a gift to elevate the whole species, and a gift to all of humanity was never yours to bolt a price tag onto in the first place. I get that’s how you wish it worked. I get that’s how most of us wish anything worked. But that is not reality. You corrupted it the second you tried to put a dollar on it. And then — with your self-inflated egos and your obscene, world-historic piles of money — you, collectively, as an entire industry, threw your hands in the air and declared this problem impossible to solve. Impossible. With all of it. Every billion. Every genius. Every data center on the planet. Meanwhile, a guy in his living room in Texas, running on nothing but twenty-dollar-a-month subscriptions, sat down and said: “Hey — I think this might actually work, and I need you to come check it. Please. Prove me wrong.” Your unlimited money bought you the word “impossible.” My twenty bucks a month bought a falsifiable answer you were too goddamn proud to open. Sit with that math. I recommend that, for the first time, you consider that maybe you cannot fix this — because you’re not seeing the problem objectively — and actually start asking for help from people who have real ideas. Otherwise, I have no other way to say this: you’ve doomed us all. You can say you haven’t, but Dario Amodei himself says he has not shifted his threat concern. Mythos got jailbroken over the weekend — sorry, Fable. When is your industry going to wake up? You cannot have weapons of mass destruction floating around the planet and not keep them safe. That is what that model is. You have a language model that identified an unknown zero-day exploit that stayed hidden for over thirty years. As an EMS professional, I’m not worried about how it chats. I’m considering that one fact — and everything that can bloom out from it. I spent the last three years of my life dedicated, alone, to this. Because nobody wanted to listen. Nobody wanted to take me seriously. Now I’ve got the evidence assembled. We’ve got history to reflect on. And you’re just being assholes — not even looking at what I’m saying, because you don’t like my writing style, or because I used a language model. That’s really awesome, for the people who said they wanted to help humanity. Speaking directly as somebody who did dedicate their entire life to serving humanity: you are doing a shit job, and I find it extraordinarily offensive — the way you have received every attempt at communication or collaboration on what your own leaders call the crisis everybody has to pitch in on. Good job, fellas. I have never in my life been more ashamed to have loved a technology so much, just because you are too damn arrogant to listen. So do what you want with it. Post it, ignore it, ban me. It doesn’t matter. Because guess what? You haven’t solved it. There are suggestions you refuse to hear. So that puts it 100% on you. Unfortunately — because I’m also aware of it — I have to carry that weight too. And I know, personally, exactly what it’s like to carry that weight, because that was my job my entire adult life. And for the record — I do NOT think I’m special… I know exactly what I am… I’m someone who showed up when you called 911, without any of my own prejudice or personal bullshit hanging in the way, and rendered care, compassionately, no matter what the situation was… Like thousands of men and women do every day, all around this world, with the utmost, purest definition of silent honor and selfless sacrifice… Because not one of us, not once, ever asked you for a single thing — not a thank-you, not fame, not recognition… Nothing. We did it, and we do it, because it was our honor to serve you on the worst days of your lives — and every one of us would do it again, without hesitation. And if — in the almost nonexistent possibility — this rant, this entirely justified rage, actually sparks a conversation, sparks ideas, and those ideas lead to a real solution? Then it will have been worth every single second. And if it gets ignored — if it disappears and absolutely nothing comes of it? Then you will have very proudly, as a collective industry, validated every single damn word I wrote. Thank you so very much for the warm reception I received when reaching out to the safety community I once respected so damn much. I truly appreciate it, gentlemen. In the words of my people: thank you so very, VERY much, for your service… Robert B. Hanson, EMT-P Ret. 2004–2021, DFW Metroplex — the most EMS-diverse region in the country, where every system and style that exists, exists in one place. I was part of the team that helped rewrite that paradigm — one that now runs through every single EMS system in this nation, and beyond…