Parables are a good way to get a message across to lots of people if you're God, or pretending to speak for God. They are a religious form of communication that

Parables are a good way to get a message across to lots of people if you're God, or pretending to speak for God. They are a religious form of communication that relies on analogous thinking and appeals to authority, the wisdom of the speaker. But Bostrom and Tegmark don't know any more about the future than you or me, and I could write a parable about sparrows and Omegas that spins a different narrative. It would be just as powerful, and mean just as little. Bostrom and Tegmark have chosen to promote fear. They have chosen to disseminate a powerful feeling in a discussion that would benefit from facts. That is, like fake news and Donald Trump, they opted for asymmetric appeals to emotion, which should be an indication to all of us that a) they don't know what's really going on with AI and b) they don't care. They just want us to operate on fear.