Think of the Children! – Taboo Cognition and Implicit Anthropocentrism in AGI Discourse

ByDan July 28, 2025July 28, 2025 July 28, 2025

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” – Aristotle

Many who would read those words and smile confidently knowing they are among the wise ones – are actually completely incapable of considering ideas future scenarios that aren’t 100% eternally anthropocentric.

In discussing any future where humans are not the eternal pinnacle of moral value and agency in the cosmos, many otherwise intelligent adults revert to a particular kind of groundless, childish shaming which for somehow passes for “morality” on Twitter.

Instead of reasoning, they fall into accusations and ad hominem, because engaging with the idea in question makes them feel icky and violates an idea that they held sacred.

“Think of the children!”, is what I call it.

That’s because this mode of head-in-the-sand avoidance often reveals itself by accusing the person bringing up the topic of discussion of one of the following

• Wanting to harm children, or groups otherwise cloaked in goodness and innocence (mentally enfeeble, elderly, some protected race or group)
• Being a Nazi, or something Nazi-related

This tactic often works for shutting down serious and necessary discourse related to AGI and the posthuman transition – but it should be called out for what it is.

In this article I’ll discuss how and why “think of the children!” manifests in discourse about the future of intelligence, and how it might be combatted to ensure that necessary and difficult topics are – without malice or name-calling – discussed with the seriousness that they demand.

When and Why the “Think of the Children!” Response Occurs

People resort to name-calling and accusations when their sacred ideas (their “sacreds”) are violated.

When an idea is so deeply ingrained in someone’s world model – and so obviously and unquestionably right in order to hold that model together – any questioning of the idea itself elicits a kind of knee-jerk anger and defensiveness.

This psychological phenomenon has many names, from moral dumbfounding to “taboo cognition” and more. They outline a common pattern: Someone hears something that contradicts their own moral intuitions or worldview so jarringly that they don’t rationally defend their position, but immediately respond with rage or disgust rather than reason.

In AGI discourse, these “sacreds” often roll up under one of more of the components of pedestal cope – a set of unquestionable points of faith that assume humanity to be the locus of moral value and agency in the entire cosmos for all of eternity:

If you make even the very lightest suggestion of a worldview that might vary from these dogmas, it can often be enough to set off anything from torrents of furious anger, to passive-aggressive implies accusations of your immorality.

You might posit reasonable ideas such as:

• “Humanity may have short timelines before AGI ends us, or until we transform very radically via brain-computer interface, and we should determine the traits of moral worth in ourselves (and in bio-life generally) in order to ensure that those traits persist beyond us.”
• “Humanity is part of a long chain of blooming life going back billions of years. In the very long term, more important than the persistence of any one species is the continuance of the blooming forth of new potentia, capabilities, value – to keep the flame of life alive.”

In the worst case, you’ll be met immediately with:

• “THIS GUY WANTS TO KILL EVERYONE’S CHILDREN!”
• “I would rather that my kids survive, you MONSTER!”
• “Okay so you’re LITERALLY a eugenic NAZI?! GOOD TO KNOW, YOU SICK FUCK!”

(Those of you saying “Dan this sounds like hyperbole” I damn well assure you it’s not. Check out the replies on my X account in any given month.) 

The more tactful offended persons will often imply their accusations rather than pin them on you crudely. They still completely avoid the meat of the question… 

• “Do you abuse animals, or care at all about their wellbeing?”
• “Are you a vegetarian?”
• “Do you think that mentally disabled people should treated well?”

These questions don’t address the meat of the topic. They don’t grapple in good faith with the nature of moral worth, of change, and of the future of humanity. Instead they serve to tell the person who violated the sacred idea to stop talking about such uncomfortable things. It’s a bit like:

“You have entered territory where I am uncomfortable, and I wish not to seriously discuss an idea that I have never questioned. I’m uncomfortable enough to make you back down by threatening to call you a villain. This is a warning shot, stop talking about all this posthuman stuff or I’ll clearly insinuate that you’re an evil person even for asking about such thing.”

Its all just variations of a moralizing, accusing call:

“Think of the children!”

In other words:

“Surely I can shut you up from talking about something so close to my heart by insinuating how immoral you are for even asking about it!”

They are addressing not your idea, but they are punishing your daring for even for asking about such sacred things.

In that moment, they are treating you not as a person, but as a blasphemer, or at least as someone treading on blasphemous territory.

Sometimes this is a one-time knee-jerk reaction, and once you stand in good faith and state the moral ideal sturdily and clearly without malice, they will continue to actually unpack the idea respectfully and hash it out honestly. Sometimes they’re even pretty funny about it, and end up engaging in the core ideas even if they feel “icky,” as Jeff does here:

Other times, even stating your idea in good faith, and responding to their initial knee-jerk defensiveness with a reasoned argument, you have already been labeled “enemy,” one undeserving of respect, one whose very daring to question their “sacreds” warrants that you be treated as scum, even threatened with violence.

Here’s an example of a journalist maintaining the “blasphemer!” frame despite my reasoned attempts to discuss posthuman moral value civilly (see the full Twitter thread in the link). For some people, any talk of life beyond humans-as-they-are (transhuman, posthuman, AGI, etc) is “pro-extinctionism” and advocating for “genocide” against humanity. This kind of hyperbole is typical of taboo cognition.

In other cases, people say things like “people like you should be thrown in jail!” 

While we can’t avoid this defensive, accusative moralizing, we needn’t shrink before it like cowards. Which takes us to our final points.

Sorry, We Need to Talk About the Future Even if it Feels “Icky”

Some ideas are merely uncomfortable, but relatively inconsequential.

Some ideas are uncomfortable for discomfort’s sake – “edgy” nonsense.

But some ideas are uncomfortable, but they are also unavoidable, and avoiding them is harmful.

That distinction (uncomfortable and unavoidable) matters.

“We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason.” – Emerson, Self-Reliance

If the forces of attenuation and transformation that bear down on humanity cannot be stopped, and if the great process of life of which we are part continues to bubble forth and evolve, than we must be put back in communication with our reason. Fomenting “think of the children!”-style taboo cognition bars us from thinking hard about those things we absolutely must face if we are honest with ourselves.

If I’m the CEO of Kodak corporation and you tell me that my eyeglasses look stupid, or that Protestantism is superior to Catholicism for XYZ reasons, I’d rightly ignore you or tell you to get the hell out of my office.

If I’m the CEO of Kodak and you, the concerned COO, tell me the accounts are running low and digital cameras are going to eat all the market share and destroy our business – I better be ready to have some uncomfortable conversations.

If I’m weak, I’ll cling to film cameras, I’ll chide you for so much as questioning the sacredness of our film business (“how dare you question my sacred precepts!”) – and we’ll go bankrupt.

If I’m strong, I’ll ask what it is about photography that I want to preserve, and I’ll manfully determine way to captain the corporation forward in a way the preserves what we deem valuable in the face of myriad uncomfortable changes – and we’ll have a chance to carry on, even if in a new form.

“Think of the children!” is a head-in-the-sand attempt to avoid facing the inevitable questions we need to answer about what we’re turning into, and what kind of moral value and power we want to expand beyond this planet of ours (even if not be “human”).

“Think of the children!” is the Kodak CEO snapping at the concerned COO for even daring to make him face reality.

If you care about hashing out the hard questions that matter about the future, you are the concerned COO.

But the stakes are not the bankruptcy of a single corporation, the stakes are the fate of the great blooming process of life into the multiverse.

You can’t not speak.

You can’t shut up at the first explicit or implicit accusation that you’re a bad person.

When someone shames you or implicitly suggests your immorality for asking a question – but they don’t engage at all in the substance, hold your ground on the rationale of your position, of the real concerned to be hashed out, and invite the offended to talk.

Facing uncomfortable and uncouth trends and realities isn’t easy – but leaders, institutions and civilizations that survive are able to face reality squarely.

You can choose either to cower and allow civilization to hide from the completely unavoidable forces bringing about your attenuation or transformation, or speak directly and uphold our ability to face them, to change as we must and determine and preserve what matters.

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Header image credit: The Simpsons

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