Hope For A Better Day After
Remember when it was just San Francisco in a doom loop? That was almost quaint. Now the whole world is in one. A mass human extinction event is on the table, with odds in Vegas and big bettors on Polymarket. For those betting against the house (or the world, in this case), it's unclear how they'll collect their post-apocalyptic winnings. But that's a trivial problem for another day.
I'm someone who has always lived by the code that there is no such thing as a fire drill. When the alarm sounds, you run like the flames are fast, fleet-footed, and coming for YOU. I'm the person who stopped searching my symptoms online because I'm never more than ten minutes and one click away from cancer. If the two ends of the spectrum are hysteria and a "free solo" relationship with fear, I sit squarely on the fault line between healthy and unhealthy paranoia.
That's why I expected a tweet that ended the world (or at least said the world was ending) to bring on all the feels. Sleepless nights. Endless anxiety. Indigestion. What I did not expect to feel was nostalgic. It's déjà vu all over again, and that's good news for all of us. Turns out I've lived through the end of the world before. And if I can do it, you can do it.
Doomsday has been around a long time. It certainly wasn't new in the '80s, but that’s when it got a rebrand, a facelift, and a revival. Total nuclear annihilation got repackaged through a steady stream of new cable channels. Think of the doomsday rebrand as New Coke, but successful. Cable came along and suddenly we had endless channels with 24-hour access. It was the perfect place for bad content to find new life. Eddie and The Cruisers anyone? And because there were only so many times one could watch Eddie and the Cruisers, I stumbled onto a bad documentary about Nostradamus. There was nothing else on, and whatever was on, we were all watching together.
Think of Nostradamus as the original conspiracy theorist. Like the internet with its latest theory, my friends and I couldn't stop talking about him, through mouthfuls of Big League Chew and the circles we spun at Spinoffs roller rink in Boston. He predicted the rise of Napoleon. No way. Maybe? He told us about Hitler. Wait. What? No way. Are you sure? And the world was going to end in a big ball of fire. Are you paying attention? That big ball of fire? Those are the Russians' nukes. We are all going to die. Like most internet conspiracy theorists, Nostradamus had just the right blend of crazy, charisma, and conviction to keep us wondering: could it be true? The only salvation we got was this: people make destiny, and people can change destiny. If we wanted to change the prophecy, we would have to do it ourselves.
We had WarGames, a teen doomsday caper with Scooby-Doo overtones (if it weren't for those meddling kids). We saw the havoc one kid could wreak with a dial-up modem, aka advanced technology, and how the threat of global thermonuclear war could go from a game we play to a reality we live because some bored geek accidentally hacked into NORAD. No one can forget the voice. It sounded ominous, inviting, treacherous, and full of promise all at once. It was the voice of AI, and its name was Joshua. Matthew Broderick and Joshua were having a grand old time until Joshua went off the rails. The doomsday clock starts ticking. We are on the brink of World War III.
Don't worry. This is the '80s, when everything gets whitewashed. Not to spoil the ending (and let's hope it turns out to be prophetic), but no one dies. Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy race to NORAD to play one final game with Joshua. We get a speed-dating version of recursive learning as Broderick teaches Joshua that the only winning move is not to play. The middle school activist and the hysteric in me were thrilled. Hear that, people? The only way to win the game of nuclear war is not to play. Problem solved. We can all sleep tonight.
But that was then and this is now. Like milk, slogans come with an expiration date. We can't apply that wisdom to the AI arms race. There is no not playing. The game is already running.
Just six months after WarGames, ABC aired The Day After. If WarGames was a thriller, The Day After was a funeral. "They told us it would be impossible to make this movie. They told us it would be impossible for you to watch it. We hope nothing is impossible." We learned the only thing worse than dying in the blast was dying slowly after it. Now I had a new fear. Not that the nukes would kill me, but that they wouldn't. That I would die a slow, painful death, all alone, in a toxic, radioactive world.
I was only 11. What did I know? But remember what I said about fire drills? The adults were sounding the alarm. Sound familiar?
The difference between then and now is that this time the warning isn't coming from a bad cable documentary about a 500-year-old French mystic. It's coming from the people building the thing. Bill Gates published a 6,000 word essay, writing as a grandfather, warning that AI poses a grave threat to human life, and that in private, the people who understand how good this technology is getting are worried but keep saying nice things in public because they're trying to raise trillions.
Jacob Coxon, a researcher who spent three years at OpenAI and Anthropic, quit and posted a thread that got more than 150 million views in a day and a half, accusing the industry of "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." Anthropic's alignment science lead backed him up and put the odds of AI-caused human extinction within the decade at greater than ten percent. To put that in terms someone tried to make reassuring: those are roughly the odds of the New York Jets making the playoffs. Then Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, called on the industry to deliberately slow down, and Sam Altman agreed within hours. That came on the heels of a letter this summer from more than 1,200 employees across every major AI lab, asking the government to help build the brake. An entire industry asking someone to slow it down. Car companies don't lobby for more safety regulations. And yet here we are.
Now here's where it gets complicated, because not everyone thinks the brake is altruistic. There's a credible argument that the doomsday warning is, at least in part, a competitive weapon. Anthropic and OpenAI are ahead. Regulatory friction hurts the companies trying to catch up far more than the ones already at the frontier. Calling for rules when you're already the biggest kid on the block is not entirely selfless. And the darker version: doom is good marketing. Nothing attracts capital like existential stakes. The fear and the funding have become nearly indistinguishable. Hold that thought.
Because the nuclear fear of the 1980s was complicated too. The defense industry profited from it. Politicians used it. The fear was real, and the machinery around it was real. Both things were true at the same time, and we still needed to take it seriously. Because the bomb was real too.
A self-serving warning can still be a true one. When the person whose literal job is making sure AI does what humans want says publicly that there's a greater than ten percent chance it kills all of us, the right response is not to interrogate his incentives. It's to ask what we're going to do about it.
Here's the thing. The nuclear fear of my childhood was real. And we navigated it. Not elegantly. Not quickly. Through protests and bad made-for-TV movies and arms control treaties and maybe a little bit of luck. Nobody "solved" nuclear weapons. We just decided, collectively and imperfectly, that we weren't going to let them solve us.
The people who get to make that choice aren't the researchers or the CEOs or the billionaire grandfathers publishing 6,000-word essays. It's the rest of us. The people who didn't build it, won't profit from it, and are just trying to figure out what to make for dinner in a world that may or may not be ending. Which, for the record, is exactly where I was in 1983. Twelve years old. Watching Kansas get vaporized. Convinced I was next.
I was not next. Neither were you. And here's what Nostradamus and all those late-night cable documentaries really taught me: people have the power to change destiny. Nostradamus was saving his best prophecy for last. When he prophesied our global demise, he wasn't rooting for our destruction. He wasn't predicting the end. He was betting on us.
Unlike Joshua, we don't get the option of not playing.. So we need to play smarter, be better, and when necessary, shut up and listen. And we need to do it faster than the technology is moving and better than the people building it are betting we will.
We are not doomed. We are warned. There's a difference. And that difference may get us to a better day than the day after.
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