“Nail’s high-blown lunacy was unexceptional among the SU speakers. What set his enthused disrupto-babble apart was its relative benignity. Later that first morning, however, I felt the tenor of the proceedings change from silly to scary. The turning point came with the onstage arrival of SU past president Neil Jacobstein, a wry veteran of the revolving-door establishment who boasts consulting stints at NASA, the Pentagon, and large weapons contractors like Boeing. Jacobstein’s matter-of-fact delivery belied the startling contents of his speech on artificial intelligence. He had a way of normalizing the outlandish and of creating the feeling that it’s crazy to cling to romantic biological defects like mortality.”