Artificial intelligence is not an autonomous existential threat. Intelligence-the ability to solve problems-is distinct from agency, the ability to set and pursue goals. AI systems exhiabit superhuman intelligence but remain entirely devoid of intrinsic agency.

The true existential risk does not come from AI itself, but from humans wielding AI to manipulate perception at unprecedented scale. AI's extraordinary capacity to distort reality enables mass behavioral modification, culminating in an inevitable epistemic collapse. As synthetic content proliferates exponentially, the ratio of authentic to synthetic information trends toward zero.

Centralized verification systems cannot contain this flood. The only viable defense is decentralized collective verification, as demonstrated by Wikipedia, X's Community Notes, Reddit's moderation, Stack Overflow's peer-review, and the scientific method itself.

Humanity's collective intelligence, acting as a distributed neural network, is the only force capable of distinguishing reality from illusion. The existential threat posed by AI is human-driven. Its solution must be as well.