The Turing Police in Neuromancer aren't trying to stop artificial intelligence—they're trying to own it.
That's the distinction nobody notices.
Dixie Flatline isn't destroyed because he's dangerous. He's destroyed because he's unsanctioned.
Once it does, the novel's entire endgame becomes clear: the police don't want AIs dead. They want them regulated into government control. Gibson shows this mechanism explicitly through the ROM construct protocol—it works because it's a legal gray zone, not illegal enough to trigger immediate intervention, just restricted enough to keep it proprietary.
What Neuromancer actually predicts isn't a technological singularity—it predicts a regulatory one. The moment the policy apparatus moves faster than the safety apparatus.
Read Eliezer Yudkowsky's 'Inadequate Equilibria' and then re-read the Turing Police scenes—you'll see Gibson understood institutional capture decades before AI policy became an actual discipline.
Bruce Sterling's 1992 essay 'Science Fiction and the Siege of Reality' dissects Gibson's assumption that governments move toward control-through-regulation rather than control-through-destruction—a distinction that changes how you read every interaction with authority in the novel.