Beats me, I'm pretty optimistic.
From Asterisk Magazine, Issue 14, June 2026:
The Doomers Are All Right
What is it like to live in a world you believe is about to end?
I opened my interviews for this article with a simple question: “How long do we have?”
Five years, or five to 10, or five to 20. One person said eight, then corrected herself to six; one said eight and stuck to it.
In this, they aren't that far off from many estimates made by experts. The bluntly titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies has hit bestseller lists by warning of the imminent risks of artificial general intelligence (AGI). The scenario AI 2027, written by a former OpenAI employee, predicts AGI within the next few years. The AI company Anthropic consistently predicts AGI by early 2027.
“I think that in most timelines, humans will simply be irrelevant and extinct,” one interviewee said.
I heard that a lot. A few interviewees — mostly employed by frontier AI labs — expected the world to become unimaginably strange in a good way. One put a 30% chance on utopia, a 30% chance on dystopia, a 30% chance on extinction, and a 10% chance on something too weird to imagine. Several refused to make any prediction; several more said only that they still had hope. About half echoed one of my most blunt respondents: “I don't think humanity is going to make it.”
What is it like to live in a world you believe is about to end?
Death was already inevitable
“I was born with a terminal condition,” said Matthew Gray, a board member at the existential risk community-building nonprofit Lightcone Infrastructure. "We call it aging. I've since picked up another. We call it multiple sclerosis. And AI is a third one on top. I'm not very worried about degenerating from multiple sclerosis because I'm pretty sure the robots will kill me first, just like I wasn't that worried about aging-related deterioration because multiple sclerosis will get me first."From this perspective, AI doomers don't face a new problem; they face the oldest problem humanity has ever faced.I pushed back. If I look at an actuarial table, I can expect another 47 years of life. I'd be pretty upset to discover I had only five.
This, my interviewees thought, was naive. Even without AI risk, I could have been hit by a car; I could have gotten cancer; I could have been nuked in a hot war between Russia and the United States. It’s not that the difference in probability doesn’t matter. It's worse to be certain that I'll die in five years than to have a 50% chance of not hitting my allotted 47. But because my death has always been an inevitability, I have been coping all along with the precarity of my existence. From this perspective, AI risk isn’t shocking and unfamiliar; it’s a significantly worse version of a problem I already know I have to deal with.
"I was never guaranteed that I was going to get a long life and a long future and a chance to meet my grandchildren,” said Gretta Duleba, an independent technical AI safety researcher and former communications manager at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. “Those were never my right. Across human history, no one has ever been entitled to the future.”....
....MUCH MORE
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