The Doomsday Cult Finds Its Latest Boogeyman

Former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon made news this week with a grim prediction about AI. “The people building AI,” he posted, “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

“No other human activity poses this level of danger,” he wrote.

Wait. We thought it was burning fossil fuels. Or having too many babies. Or nuclear winter. Or …

We’d be concerned about this latest end-of-the-world-is-nigh if we hadn’t heard countless predictions from “experts” over the years about how mankind’s reckless ways were threatening our very existence.

Fifty years ago, Paul Ehrlich predicted mass starvation because population growth, he said, was outstripping our ability to produce more food.

Never happened. In fact, we have the opposite problem today of mass obesity.

Back in 1977, President Jimmy Carter warned the nation that “we could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”

In the U.S. alone, proved oil reserves have increased 28% since he made that prediction. And even with the Iran war spike, inflation-adjusted gasoline prices are lower today than they were in 1977.

Climate “expert” Greta Thunberg — along with an army of other “experts” — has issued so many apocalyptic predictions about global warming that we’ve lost count. But even the United Nations — the keeper of the “climate crisis” flame — has admitted that those worst-case scenarios aren’t based on any actual science.

Economist Mark Perry once gathered up 18 “spectacularly wrong” predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970 about various environmental calamities that would kill off mankind. Our favorites:

Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that ‘civilization will end within 15 or 30 years [by 1985 or 2000] unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.’

The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, ‘Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.’

‘It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,’ declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time Magazine that, ‘At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.’

Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, ‘Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.’

These look amusing today. But at the time they were taken very seriously.

Worse, all these doom-and-gloom predictions came with, and often resulted in, greater government intervention, which often seems to be the point. Generate mass hysteria to justify more taxes. More regulations. More mandates. A stronger central government.

The same is true of those world-is-ending-because-of-AI predictions. They are invariably accompanied by calls to increase government intervention of, and regulations on, AI.

Which is ironic, given that the biggest threat to the existence of mankind — as proven by long and bloody history — is government itself. If you don’t believe so, just ask the millions upon millions of Chinese, Ukrainians, North Koreans, Cambodians, Jews, etc., etc., slaughtered by their own unencumbered central governments.

There are no doubt legitimate concerns about the uses and the impact of a revolutionary new technology like AI. It will be disruptive. It will cause problems. Living in the midst of rapid change is anxiety-inducing.

But what history also tells us is that free people, not government bureaucrats, always manage to find ingenious solutions to problems that the “experts” never expect. So, we’re placing our bets now that Jacob Coxon will look like a fool in 2036.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

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