By elaborating on Albert O. Hirschman’s map of the rhetoric of reaction, which identifies the main theses of conservatism in its opposition to social change (perversity, futility, jeopardy), this chapter considers the first set of objections that might be put forward against intervention: perversity and futility. According to perversity objections, we should refrain from intervening because intervention will actually make things worse. According to futility objections, intervention should not be attempted because it is bound to fail, due to either structural or substantive limitations. It subjects these objections to Bostrom and Ord’s Reversal Test and identifies instances of status quo biases in them, providing us with additional reasons to reject them. It concludes that, at most, these objections suggest what the interventionist may easily concede: That intervention should be performed just in case it is informed and when the expected outcome is net positive for wild animals.

Whereas today’s “narrow” AI machines can be easily controlled, the probable advent over the coming decades of machines endowed with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will pose a far more difficult control challenge – for such machines will function as agents endowed with many human-like capabilities. The AI expert Stuart Russell has proposed a radical new design for the motivational architecture of AI machines, which he calls “humble AI.” Rather than programming AI machines to pursue specific goals, he argues, it would be much safer to give them a single broad goal, namely, maximizing the realization of human preferences. The key innovation here lies in programming the machines so that they can never be 100 percent certain about what those human preferences are – a gambit that restores ultimate control over the machines’ behavior to their human overseers. Russell argues persuasively that fundamental safety research in the field of AI needs to be pursued as a much higher priority than it currently receives today.