I’ve become strangely fascinated with the amount of people in my life who at some point in the last two decades started thinking about artificial intelligence and then decided that the only two options are the extinction of humanity or blissful abundance along the lines described by Marx, where we do a little work in the morning and spend the rest of the day as we please.
Normally we treat doomsday cults as exotic lunacies. This was especially true for my generation in America where the Branch Davidian cult ended up in a standoff with federal authorities that culminated in spectacular violence. Or the Heaven’s Gate cult, whose members committed suicide in March 1997, hoping to hop a ride on the Hale-Bopp comet.
A few manage to gain respect. Famously in the 1960s and 1970s, the People’s Temple, led by Jim Jones, attracted every significant political figure in San Francisco at some point, before they committed revolutionary suicide.
But the AI doomsayers are attached to what is arguably the most important high-tech industry in the country, at least as judged by the incredible capital investments being made. People like Nick Bostrom, author of Superintelligence, or Nate Soares, the president of an AI-safety project, are regularly solicited for their views in mainstream media. This subculture’s weirdly flip habit of assigning fake epistemic confidence percentages to predictions of human extinction or mass joblessness are intended to signal intellectual humility, but actually convey to more careful thinkers that one is dealing with a crank.
I think the most under-explored aspect of the doomsday phenomenon is the psychological satisfactions offered by the impending end of the world, or the impending translation of our lives into paradise.
First, communities that become possessed by these ideas experience higher agency among their people. All at once, their moral energies are directed to the eschaton, the culmination of the human story, where it ends in total disaster or complete triumph. Secondly, all the grinding, intractable problems or dilemmas of life are thrown into relief. They’ll be over soon. They don’t count for much anymore, given the apocalypse at hand. The prospect of long-suffering is lightened, so too the need to discipline oneself or to put faith in Providence the normal way, which involves trusting God’s plan when his work remains mysterious, inscrutable, or not plain to you. Lastly, there is a kind of gnostic bonus for adepts of an apocalyptic faith. The knowing sense that “we will be proven right” and everyone else will look like such damned fools, caught up in their deluded, unreflective belief that things will just continue as they have before, when we know that this revelation or social change or technology or prophet’s miracle means they cannot.
Apocalyptic heresies recur so frequently because we really are strange creatures — creatures who feel something in life pulling us toward the eternal, the changeless, toward an ultimate horizon. When I hear Nate Soares tell people he has stopped contributing to his 401k because he simply doesn’t expect human life to exist, or to exist in any recognizable form in a few years, I hear a distortion of the Beatitudes, a belief that in the light of the eternal truth, we should be like the lilies of the field. The Kingdom of Superintelligence is at hand.