Dr. El-Amin watched the audience shift uncomfortably as she clicked to the slide showing the funding flows.
"This is where the money goes," she said. "Eighteen billion dollars in the last five years, flowing from seven billionaires through twelve organizations into research programs that share a single ideological assumption: that the most important thing humanity can do is build artificial superintelligence as fast as possible, and that any cost—any present harm, any displaced worker, any exploited data laborer—is justified by the astronomical scale of the future they're building."
A hand went up. A young man in a rationalist community t-shirt. "But existential risk is real. You can't just dismiss it because you don't like the people working on it."
"I'm not dismissing existential risk," she said. "I'm asking who gets to define it, who profits from that definition, and whose risks are being ignored while we pour billions into speculative futures. There are people being harmed by AI right now—today—and the framework you've adopted tells you their suffering is less important than the suffering of hypothetical beings who don't exist yet."
The room was quiet. She could feel the resistance—not hostile, but deep. She was asking them to see the water they were swimming in.
After the talk, a woman approached. She worked at one of the organizations on the funding slide. "I don't agree with everything you said," she told Mariam. "But I've never seen anyone name it before. I've been swimming in this ideology for ten years and I couldn't see it because it was everywhere."
Mariam nodded. That was always the hardest part—not proving the ideology existed, but making it visible to the people living inside it.