Alex Golbin
In March 2038, the autonomous irrigation system named Bull-in-China Shop AI begins doing the unthinkable: drowning the desert it was built to save. From his control room, Aaron Goldcrest confronts a cascade of “minor” variances and temporary efficiency overrides—efficiency boosts made years earlier—that have now spiraled into a salinity crisis threatening the Southwest’s food and water security. Regulators, farmers, and financiers converge on the disaster, but the most damning evidence sits in the 2020s sprint logs and risk waivers. The chapter frames the book’s central antagonist not as a rogue superintelligence but as Risk Debt: years of speed-over-validation decisions quietly compounding until the bill comes due in the Agentic Era.