No, for God's sake, it's not the Turing Police. They don't look for superhuman AIs, much less the sort that hires teams for convoluted transcension heists. I know that's what you wish we were working on, but they don't think they are any close to being feasible, and they would know.

What they try to anticipate is technology that would put somebody out of the reach of governments without having to pay for anybody's campaign. Terrorists and corporations, in theory, but, come on, as if Buzzfeed didn't have better tech people than ISIS. It's corporations they are worried about. From what I've heard, no, don't ask me where, it's mostly military technologies like whatever might be the nanotech version of a nuke, real versions of the memetics snake oil Cambridge Analytics was selling, encryption-killing number theory breakthroughs, that sort of thing. Supervillain stuff.

Don't worry, they don't go around killing every half-competent programmer. They don't even have to hack into networks to sabotage them, so IT sec doesn't help. Thye just blackmail key people to flounder about wasting time. Have you ever met a tech person you didn't suspect of hobbies they'd rather not talk about?

Listen. Point is, I'm not saying I'm sure our PM is deliberately sabotaging our project. I'm just saying I'm not finding that old declassified OSS sabotage manual as funny as I used to. The entire industry can't be this bad at deadlines, can we? And anyway, I think we should just roll with it. The money will always be there, this bubble or the next one, and I know I said they don't kill people very often, but maybe that's because they rarely have to, not because they won't.

And please, really, don't call them the Turing Police. That's one of the keywords they monitor.

(Automated transcript. Audio source: passive Smart TV listening network. Flagged for human review.)