The Last Word on AI and the Atom Bomb

My Big Idea came to me on a soggy August day on Long Island Sound, captive in a lifeless O'Day Mariner, knee to sweaty knee with the houseguest I so wanted to please, sails slopping about uselessly, out of beer and potato chips, at the mercy of the small outboard which--of course--conked out. During the long embarrassing tow, my guest, who was a physicist, speculated that a "shear pin" in the motor failed, exactly as it was designed to do, to keep the aging and overheated putt-putt from cooking itself to death--a deliberately weak link that breaks the circuit before real damage happens. What if such a circuit breaker in my brain had stopped me from suggesting Let's go sailing! on a day clearly meant for an air-conditioned movie theater. Wouldn't it be great if automatic brakes in our heads shut us down before we shot off our mouths? Such purposeful failure is routinely engineered into just about everything--by engineers, or by evolution.