I don’t speak until I trust the words. I hold back. I edit myself. I miss my moment.

I stay quiet even when the cost isn’t mine alone. Don’t mistake my quiet for indifference.

For years that quiet felt like caution. Now it feels like a risk.

Take antisemitism. I wish I could wipe it off the face of this Earth. That’s a child’s wish. I grew up a generation after the Holocaust and still hesitate before dropping the H‑bomb in polite company. I’ve watched its weight evaporate while louder voices take the air. I’ve let them.

I’m less willing now. Not because I’ve grown braver—but because the stakes have grown larger.

Call me a Semite. It’s not just semantics. It’s woven into my identity. Call me an anti‑antisemite. That leads to a word I brace for: Israel. Like the Holocaust, it rearranges the air. Call me anti‑anti‑any race, religion, or sexual orientation—the fine print we sign and claim to honor.

I grew up with the news always on. Pundits on the airwaves. Opinions around the dinner table. I’ve rarely said, “boo.” When I’ve finally worked up the courage to speak—whether across a dinner table or into a glowing Zoom square—I’ve often been cut short or dismissed. Sometimes I don’t get the floor at all. That’s when I’m not on mute.

Why is it acceptable—even tragically hip—to shout for the rights of indigenous peoples and harbor a blind spot for Jews? Firebomb the firebombed. Violate the violated. Blame the already buried. Call it justice. Who gets to rank suffering? Who sits on that tribunal?

The voice inside my head comes from earlier regimes. Dead or alive, their logic survives. Their ambition is erasure—of Jews and anyone who wishes the fine print will save them.

With billions of stars in the sky, even this fight begins to look small. The stars don’t intervene. Antisemitism still lands here.

Yet I’m still here—a Jew, an introvert, an Earthling.

Don’t you carry more than one identity, too? Some of us aren’t protected by that fine print we sign—certainly not Jews. 

Now something new enters the room. Not another ideology, but a funhouse mirror that reflects us—existentially distorted and enlarged.

Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer of modern artificial intelligence, says human extinction isn’t science fiction. We’re creating tools that could outthink us, outmaneuver us, and slip beyond our control.

That’s the trajectory. No metaphor. No exaggeration.

Make something powerful enough and it erases the Semites, the antisemites, and the rest of us, too. No one left to argue. No one left to be right.

If AI ever gains the power to blow the planet to smithereens, the universe won’t blink. A machine that can’t care won’t blink either.

One moment we’re arguing. Then—darkness.

That darkness isn’t theoretical. These tools already outrun our supervision—guiding markets, weapons, even biological research. We may not be able to shut them off.

They don’t hate. They don’t forgive. They don’t care. They execute.

AI doesn’t invent our hatred. It trains on it. It learns our blind spots. What goes in fractured can come out weaponized. It can amplify hatred—faster, farther, without conscience.

We’ve seen this pattern before. We split the atom and built a bomb that still hangs over us. It can end us. AI may simply get there first. Feed old hatreds into large learning models and extinction stops sounding like rhetoric. It starts looking engineered.

Call me a Semite. Call me human. I’m no longer muted—so let me share this dare.

If we’re clever enough to design machines that outthink us, we’re clever enough to stop them.

Cooperate—before the thing we built forces us to.

Picture enemies in the same encrypted chat thread—not trading threats but quietly swapping safeguards. Rival labs sharing shutdown protocols. Governments comparing kill‑switches the way they once compared warheads.

We know how to unleash power. We can choose to shut it down.

Or we keep perfecting outrage—until the lights go out.

Dare we be bold enough, together, to put even the faintest, hard‑won smile on the face of this Earth?

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)