So a journalist with the Middle East Eye asked me to answer a few questions for her piece on current tech enthusiasm for the end of the world. That is, why are tech folks joyously advancing AI even though their collective p(doom) [that is, percentage chance of doom by AI] is high and getting higher and they are afraid, as noted in the NYT, of producing a permanent underclass. Meanwhile, why are politicians and venture capitalists unhelpfully announcing the coming of the Antichrist (and, by implication, the Second Coming of Jesus)? Why has Jacob Coxon of OpenAI and Anthropic declared that everyone in those companies thinks we’re all going to die in ten years?

Here’s our exchange:

1. In a recent interview, JD Vance openly said that if doing God’s work leads to the ‘end times’, he is okay with that. What is behind this ‘Armageddon complex’ exhibited by these powerful figures – from Peter Thiel’s Antichrist lectures to JD Vance and Sam Altman’s indifference to causing the destruction of humanity – amid the growing threats of the climate crisis, nuclear war and AI? Is it a sincerely held belief, or does political posturing also come into play (e.g. in the case of Vance)?

I think there’s a continuum of awareness and expertise in the doom crowd. People like Vance actually don’t know anything meaningful about the technology but have religious perspectives that make them comfortable with the idea that the world could end soon (compare to American televangelist Billy Graham saying that nuclear bombs would be the “fires of heaven” from 2 Peter and, as a result, favoring nuclear war). It’s distressing that there’s a powerful undercurrent in American Christianity that says the world will end soon, and that this would be a good thing. [side note: responding to this inspired me to go look at the “Rapture Index” to see how it handles AI, and I was surprised by the absence of mention…I figured they would have a way of squeezing it into their existing categories.] It’s worth keeping in mind, however, that there really are tech experts in the doom crowd.

It’s worth keeping in mind that there are (probably increasingly) religious people seeing AI in positive alignment with their beliefs. I noted a while back and then again that a thing of interest to me is the day that Christians start saying Jesus will come as AI. Well, just the other day I received an email from an author with the subject line “AI as the new Christ?” and a hope that I would look over the author’s work. So, there’s room for people to see the technological end of the world as doom-for-some without it being doom-for-them. 

To the main question: are the various doom claims authentic or posturing, I think it’s both. Sometimes, you see someone in the tech crowd say “well, it’s going to happen so we need to get there first and prevent bad outcomes.” That often aligns with IPO claims and VC rounds. But I think there are folks who genuinely fear the outcomes of their own work but persist out of a misguided notion that they can make something good happen. There are, after all, utopian narratives of transcendence through AI that also prompt behavior. In my latest book, Futureproofing Humanity, I talk about this as an irresponsible myth. I genuinely believe we could put technology, including AI, to the benefit of humankind but that we need to start telling ourselves better stories about what we’re trying to accomplish and how we’re going to do it. 

2. Why are these tech billionaires so convinced their technology is an existential threat to humanity, and yet so keen to accelerate a movement towards it?

This connects to the above, and is the principal theme of my latest book. Existential threat is a rhetorical device that lets you tout your own significance (thereby driving public action and policymaking) while ignoring the real issues of inequality, environmental destruction, etc. that we should be trying to solve. In the case of billionaires, I’m pretty sure none of them think they in the same risk category as the rest of us. Their private compounds in Hawaii and New Zealand (and probably elsewhere) are a reflection of potential future unrest; but they’re basically building military forts that could sustain them through political, technological, or climate emergencies.  If they can build enough wealth now, they can defer the costs to the rest of the planet. We already see the costs of AI development deferred to marginalized people around the world and to the future costs of environmental degradation (not to mention the deferred costs of whatever AI will do to the economy, democracy, etc.). I don’t believe the tech billionaires literally think the odds are high of total human extinction; but I believe they recognize that someone is going to have to pay a very heavy cost for what we’re doing and they don’t believe they’ll be the ones to pay it. After all, we don’t make them pay the costs of their choices now. 

3. What do you think of the quasi-religious fervor with which certain figures in Silicon Valley are pursuing AGI and other technologies as if it were a messianic figure? 

This has been a subject of my work for over twenty years, tracing to my first book, Apocalyptic AI, and essays before then. Silicon Valley has absorbed a techno-religion that brings together science fiction, century-old transhumanist aspirations (see folks like JBS Haldane and Julian Huxley), and American apocalyptic brands of Christianity. All that came together in the influential work of scientists and engineers like Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil, and Vernor Vinge (though there were other cheerleaders). Books like Moravec’s Mind Children and Robot and Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near became influential in the Silicon Valley crowd in the first decade of the 21st century as our collective fervor over the transformative potential of the Internet dulled into routinization, the dot.com bubble, and, worst of all, the pursuit of profit that demolished the ideology of early Internet pioneers. As the Internet became everyday and utterly captive to profit and propaganda, the utopian dreams once driving it had to move elsewhere. Moravec and Kurzweil, in particular, had laid the groundwork for that in their apocalyptic dreams of a transcendent robotic future for humankind. 

All that is profoundly religious and is not rooted in rigorous logic or economics. I do not reject the idea that there could be human-equivalent, or even greater-than-human, machine intelligence. But I don’t have magical faith in Moore’s Law or LLM scaling to produce that. When the tech folks draw up curves of exponential growth they ignore the fact that literally nothing in human life or economy operates with indefinite exponential progress. All systems have limits. So, I don’t think believing in the inevitability of machine intelligence will actually produce that outcome or do anything especially useful. It’s wildly unhelpful to just believe in the necessity and transcendence of AI and then act to bring that around. Instead of simply believing that the future is predetermined and inevitable, we should be thinking carefully about what we want and how we’ll go about it. We might then leverage progress toward the betterment of human civilization (shared broadly) and the planet. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: AI moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and think about it once in a while, you could miss it.

Read Futureproofing Humanity for more (purchase links and praise on that page).