The apocalypse has escaped the laboratory.
AI’s most immediate threat may not be what machines do to humanity, but what the expectation of annihilation does to us first.
When Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic, he accused the world’s leading AI companies of racing toward self-improving superintelligence while “gambling with our lives.” The warning reached tens of millions of people. An Anthropic colleague, Evan Hubinger, publicly placed the chance of AI killing everyone within the next decade at greater than 10 percent.
Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize–winning “godfather of AI,” had previously offered similarly unsettling odds over a longer timeframe. He has now said that Hubinger’s extinction claim of 10% ‘is not unreasonable’.
Of course, none of these estimates is a scientific forecast in any ordinary sense. There is no actuarial table for machine superintelligence. But psychologically, that may not matter. Once the possibility of imminent human extinction enters the public imagination, it becomes something more than a disputed technical proposition. It becomes a meme: portable, contagious and capable of changing the behaviour of its host.
The first symptom is a shrinking future.
Why save for retirement if retirement may never arrive? Why spend years studying for examinations? Why protect your health, build a business or endure the difficult middle years of a marriage? For an 80-year-old, the thought may bring guilty relief: at least I have lived. For a 20-year-old, it can dissolve the horizon on which adulthood depends.
A civilisation quietly runs on confidence in tomorrow. Mortgages, universities, pensions, medical research and parenthood are all wagers that the future will exist. If enough people stop placing those wagers, the extinction meme can begin damaging society without any superintelligence ever appearing.
Some people will retreat into anxiety, insomnia and compulsive doomscrolling. Others will borrow recklessly, gamble, use drugs or pursue dangerous experiences under the banner of enjoying the time remaining. Workers may abandon occupations they assume AI will soon eliminate. Couples may postpone having children—or rush into parenthood before an imagined deadline. Families may fracture between believers, sceptics and those simply desperate to change the subject.
Then come the entrepreneurs of dread. Apocalyptic expectations create customers for survival bunkers, miracle investments, secret escape plans and charismatic prophets. They also invite political extremism. If extinction is genuinely weeks or years away, almost any measure can be presented as reasonable: authoritarian control, sabotage, violence or a reckless race to build a supposedly protective superintelligence first.
That is the dark power of the meme. It converts uncertainty into certainty and concern into fatalism.
Yet contagion can travel in another direction. Fear can produce whistleblowers, safety research, international treaties and democratic pressure. It can force questions that technology companies would prefer to postpone. The difference lies in whether the message is “we are doomed” or “the danger is serious enough to require action.”
The rational response is neither denial nor surrender. It is to plan for a long life while working to keep that life possible.
AI may or may not become an extinction machine. But the belief that humanity has already lost could become a machine of its own—and it is running now.
