Are we in the AI end times?

Humans are probably the only species on Earth that actively fantasizes about its own extinction — and definitely the only one that actively participates in it. Even that whole thing about lemmings running off cliffs is a myth, but we bald-ish primates not only turn existential doom into entertainment (consider the entire post-apocalyptic genre writ large) or religious movements, we constantly invent new ways to derail our global society and put all of us at risk of mass death. 

The latest serious entry to this category is artificial intelligence, which isn’t actually intelligence, nor does it reflect a brand new fear. But the dramatic advancements made in AI over the last several years has finally made it something that scares people almost as much as nuclear weapons or the hand of God. Will AI truly become an agent of mass destruction? Nobody actually knows, but that isn’t stopping people from making some outlandish bets. 

This situation has been made worse by the heads of AI companies warning or threatening the public that the tools they’re developing could do more than just eliminate everyone’s job: it could take out humanity itself. We are drowning in tech-bro manifestos that simultaneously uphold AI as a miracle technology and a terrorist’s wet dream, all of it so steeped in marketing lingo that it’s difficult to parse how threatening or auspicious it actually is.

Meanwhile, our president boasts in all-caps rants that a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT” is all we need to regulate this technology, which for most people is literally the opposite of reassurance, as with his insistence that AI apocalypse is a “hoax.” Donald Trump has also been playing the old-fashioned Red card, saying that any attempt to rein in AI, it will only help China get ahead in the race. “Whoever wins with AI wins,” Trump told reporters during his weekend jaunt to Ireland.

What are we trying to win, exactly? That isn’t clear. Is it control of self-replicating armies of autonomous drones, or a cancer-free utopia that hits Type II on the Kardashev scale? For now, both options are well within the realm of fantasy, though the former is much less so. All of this rests on assumptions that the current technology, built on so-called large-language models, will develop into artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical computer system that surpasses human intelligence in all domains. Keep in mind that there’s no hard evidence that LLMs, which are essentially souped-up versions of the predictive text algorithm on your phone, are going to assemble into something so complex and godlike. 

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The leaps required to go from AI to AGI are massive, nonlinear and still very theoretical. But fearmongers are jumping even further ahead and saying that once AGI exists, it could mean curtains for the human species. It’s wise to be skeptical of hypotheticals stacked on hypotheticals. The argument over what to do about this ranges from doubling down on AI development with zero regulation to burning down all the data centers. MAGA is basically warning us not to let the Chinese Communist Party get its grubby hands on the tech first: Shut up and trust Big Tech, or “Let Data reign!” Plus, the AI boom is totally not a bubble! Don’t even consider that all the adrenalized rhetoric might be about keeping the stock market adrift and less about the actual utility of AI.

Perhaps where one stands on the issue depends on how deeply they internalized “The Terminator” or “The Matrix.” Regardless, none of us asked to be in this AI race. Why isn’t cooperation with China a bigger consideration? We can imagine algorithms with godlike intelligence but not AI diplomacy? The whole thing smacks of Cold War déjà vu.

Sure, it’s probably logical to dread the future AI could bring, arguably if it leads to the collapse of late-stage capitalism. Maybe it’s past time to examine what we’re actually afraid of and why, rather than making assumptions about what AI can or can’t do, especially in the future. After all, it’s just a technology, a tool — which means it’s also a weapon in the wrong hands. Indeed, AI has already been widely used in warfare, from U.S. strikes on Iran to fully autonomous drones in the Russia-Ukraine war. It’s not hard to imagine this situation getting worse, but don’t forget who’s in control. As my colleague Alex Galbraith has argued, “CEOs can’t take credit for the successes of A.I. while avoiding the negative externalities. They’re both the results of real decisions made by actual thinking people. The blame for any harm the technology inflicts should lay with its creators.”

If tech bros are saying that AI might someday break containment and take down civilization, that sounds like an accountability sink coupled with an investor pitch. Maybe it’s Silicon Valley that should be scared we’ll call their bluff, or imprison their executives, for whatever crimes may someday occur. But why do we latch onto the fears they sell us? Maybe it’s embedded human instinct, an afterglow of developing self-awareness of our own mortality, to consider existential risks. That impulse certainly dates back before the time of Jesus, but with the advent of the atomic era, apocalypse is actually possible, though that prospect has less to do with the nightmare scenarios of the Book of Revelation than with the military-industrial complex. Yet fears about AI dominate the discourse while bigger and more imminent threats go largely unacknowledged.

There’s a strange religious tone to all of this, as pointed out by AI researcher Timnit Gebru in a Wired interview last week. What’s “really existential,” she said, “is AI powering autonomous weapons, killing machines, that are actually being used in warfare. The climate catastrophe is a real thing that could be exacerbated by what these tech companies are building. Bosses are using AI as an excuse to get rid of their pesky workers. This machine-god narrative is, in my opinion, meant to distract us from these. The industry has become a mix of cults, a mix of people who are true believers, just like a preacher who says the end times is coming. The singularity has been coming for decades now.”

Considering the massive and growing deadly impact of air pollution, heat waves, freak floods and other disasters, the No. 1 existential threat to humanity remains climate change, which is on track to get much worse by mid-century. Global heating is driven overwhelmingly by the fossil fuel industry, yet in the U.S. we’re regulating that less stringently than ever, with the Environmental Protection Agency announcing on Monday the repeal of rules that limit greenhouse gas emissions of coal and gas plants. Of course the AI industry is linked to all that through the destructive appetite of data centers, but if we think that only imaginary killing machines can wipe out most of human civilization, we need to think again. We’re already well on the way to doing that.