This essay is basically part two of what Montaigne began with his 24th, arguing that we cannot take great strategic lessons from so many outcomes of the past because luck had so much to do with how those events transpired.

And I could take this in any number of directions, like I did yesterday. But I’m not really in the mood to surf lightly through a bunch of doom scenarios today. Instead, I just want to offer a simple, rather banal statement: no one should be permitted to gamble the future of humanity.

No one has ever been elected with the expressed authority to gamble everyone’s lives with that mandate. No king or emperor has a legitimate claim to that kind of power.

No church has a large enough global following to dictate the coming of an apocalypse or what must be done to either prevent it or invite catastrophe.

And, most of all, no corporation has the right to build a product that its own people assume has a non-zero chance of killing every human being. There’s simply no way that the profit motive should ever be mixed up with the creation of devices that can cause a mass extinction event, for the simply reason that if a kill-switch is necessary to protect humanity from a technology, why should we assume that a corporate leader would value human safety over shareholder value, especially when those leaders would hold hundreds of billions of dollars worth of those shares?

To me, this is the primary political question of our age — how do we prevent greedy, power-hungry individuals from gambling with our air, water, sanity, capital markets, information ecosystems, etc.?

And one last request — if we could just ban sports gambling once again while we’re at it, I think that would be good for the world as well. But perhaps that’s asking too much.