APOCALOPTIMIST

Or: Why Humans Are Absolutely Certain Everything Is About to End (Again)

Human beings have many wonderful qualities. We invented sandwiches. We domesticated dogs. We created the ability to watch a man eat 14 cheeseburgers on YouTube while we ourselves eat a salad and feel morally superior.

But perhaps our greatest achievement is this:

We are completely convinced the world is about to end.

Not eventually. Not in a billion years when the sun explodes. No. We mean Tuesday. Possibly before lunch.

This belief has been extremely popular for thousands of years.

And right now, thanks to AI, it is having a bit of a moment.

The current apocalypse: AI

If you spend any time on X, which is a website where calm, balanced people gather to exchange measured thoughts such as “WE ARE ALL DOOMED,” you will discover that artificial intelligence is about to:

Take all our jobs

Destroy all creativity

Collapse civilisation

And possibly steal our lunch money

According to various Very Serious People like Elon Musk, who warned AI could be “summoning the demon,” Geoffrey Hinton, who left Google so he could speak more freely about its dangers, and historian Yuval Noah Harari, who believes AI could “hack human civilisation,” artificial intelligence may soon become smarter than humans, at which point it will logically conclude that humans serve no purpose except maybe as decorative plant holders.

This is alarming, especially for those of us who have never been useful as plant holders.

Entire industries are currently in a state of existential panic.

Writers are panicking.

Artists are panicking.

Programmers are panicking.

LinkedIn influencers are panicking, which is particularly concerning because they normally panic in a very calm and synergistic way.

The general feeling is that something enormous is happening, and it may not involve us being in charge anymore.

Which, historically speaking, is a feeling humans have had roughly every 11 minutes.

For example: The printing press

In the 1400s, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press.

This allowed books to be produced quickly and cheaply.

Which sounds great.

Unless you were Johannes Trithemius, a respected German abbot, who warned that printed books would destroy civilisation because people would stop properly training their memories and intellectual discipline would collapse.

Because if ordinary people had access to books, they might read them.

And if they read them, they might think.

And if they thought, they might start having opinions.

And as we all know, civilisation cannot survive opinions.

Experts warned that society would collapse under the weight of all this dangerous reading.

Instead, humanity got libraries, science, and eventually instruction manuals explaining how to assemble Swedish furniture incorrectly.

Then came the novel

When novels became popular in the 1700s, people panicked again.

Critics like Samuel Johnson worried that novels would fill young people’s heads with fantasy and weaken their grip on reality.

Readers would become addicted to imaginary worlds.

They would lose touch with reality.

They would become emotionally unstable.

This prediction turned out to be completely wrong.

Today, young people are emotionally unstable for entirely different reasons.

Then came electricity

When electricity arrived, many people believed it was unnatural and dangerous.

The New York Times, in 1878, warned electric light might be impractical and unsafe compared with gas lamps.

Which, to be fair, electricity absolutely is dangerous.

Electricity can kill you.

It can also power a toaster, which can burn your toast, which is basically the same thing.

People worried electricity would disrupt the natural order.

They were correct.

It disrupted the natural order of sitting in the dark.

Then came television

When television became popular, experts warned it would rot our brains.

Film executive Darryl F. Zanuck confidently predicted people would soon get bored of staring at a box every night.

This turned out to be extremely accurate.

But civilisation survived anyway.

Mostly because television eventually gave us nature documentaries narrated by British people, which makes even brutal animal violence sound soothing.

“And here, the gazelle is being eaten alive. Marvellous.”

Then came the internet

When the internet arrived, people warned it would spread misinformation, destroy attention spans, and create endless pointless arguments.

Astronomer Clifford Stoll, writing in Newsweek in 1995, dismissed the idea it would ever replace newspapers or transform commerce in a meaningful way.

This prediction was so accurate it’s honestly unsettling.

And yet, here we are.

Still alive.

Still arguing.

Still googling “will my heart go back into AFIB” after sneezing.

And now: AI

Now we have AI.

Which can write essays.

Create art.

Compose music.

Generate videos.

And produce emails that sound exactly like emails written by humans, which is to say:

Polite.

Professional.

And clearly written by someone who hopes you will never reply.

AI is undeniably different.

It is faster.

More capable.

More unsettling.

It feels less like a tool and more like a thing.

Which is new.

In the past, tools did not feel like things.

A hammer never quietly judged you.

AI might.

The apocalypse problem

Here is the strange thing.

Humans have been predicting the end of the world forever.

Plato complained that writing would weaken memory.

Socrates worried new technologies would erode human thinking.

And they have been consistently wrong.

Not a single apocalypse has ever successfully happened.

Which is a terrible track record for apocalypses.

And yet.

Every time.

We believe it.

Completely.

Because this time feels different.

This time, the threat feels real.

This time, the change feels too big.

This time, we may not be in control.

And this is where the Apocaloptimist lives.

This is the end.

They believe the systems we rely on are about to fail.

That something has been unleashed which we do not fully understand.

That this time, the warnings are real.

That this time, the collapse is coming.

They do not find this comforting.

They believe it.

And they might be right.

But I am hopeful.

Because every generation before us was also convinced they were living at the end.

When books arrived.

When electricity arrived.

When the internet arrived.

Each time, something did end.

But the world didn’t.

It changed.

And then, inconveniently, it carried on.