First strike. The California Senate just passed a bill that will effectively ban open-source AI development in the state unless bimbo governor Gavin Newsom checks his own party with a veto. Am I shocked? Even by today’s gutter policy standards, I’ll admit I was a bit surprised. But in a sprawling, late-stage bureaucracy, in which only the worst people alive are incentivized to work in government, such self-immolating stupidity is the power of even one, committed bugman. Today, that bugman’s name is Scott Wiener, a State Senator and the official architect of SB 1047.

But are California bugmen solely responsible for this first strike attack against the thinking robots, or is there another figure pulling the strings from the shadows? Then, there’s also the question of the legislation itself. Is it really beyond the pale? Among people working in the field, casual use of religious language to describe what’s being built is not uncommon. If software engineers are actually creating a synthetic God, more decisive in battle than the most powerful nuclear weapons on the planet, do we really want Him (or Her) open-sourced for any hostile foreign government to clone? And why are any of these questions, on matters so fundamentally new, considered beyond the pale by attention-starved venture capitalists on social media?

To this final age-old question, I leave speculation to the reader. But I’ve put some thought into the rest. Our story begins with the drama, which exploded early last week —