Shelter Drills for a Mind We Cannot Picture
Civil defence was never about predicting the disaster. It was about rehearsing for it while there was still time to think.
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The old civil defence pamphlets are easy to laugh at now. Duck under the desk. Fill the bathtub. Keep a radio. They look naive in hindsight.
But the pamphlets were doing something sensible. They were taking an unlikely, enormous, hard-to-imagine event and breaking it into steps that ordinary people could rehearse.
Rehearsal is not prophecy
Planning for an outcome is not the same as predicting it. You buy insurance against a fire you do not expect. A drill is a way to think clearly about a scenario before the scenario makes clear thinking impossible.
- Name the scenario precisely enough that you would recognise it.
- Decide in advance what early warning signs would look like.
- Agree on what you would want to already have in place.
- Rehearse, then return to ordinary life.
The drill for this century
For advanced AI, the drill is mostly institutional: research into understanding and steering these systems, ways to evaluate them before deployment, and agreements about what nobody should build in a hurry. None of it requires certainty that the worst will happen. All of it is cheaper before than after.