Our darkest hour approaches

The AI Doomers were right: human civilization as we know it is in fact ending. Just not in the way they thought that it would.

It’s 1931, the economy has cratered, and your farm is failing. The bank has foreclosed your dream and you sell it for pennies on the dollar before packing up and heading to the city, where you hope to scrape out a living. Tearfully, you sell everything you had, tell your children that you’ll try to get some food tonight, and hope for the best.

The Great Depression and Dust Bowl are seared into our collective memories here in America. Many other cultures have similar crises woven into their narratives; China’s Great Leap Forward, the Third Reich, gulags, and more. The 20th century was one of the most dramatic of human history.

It will soon be our time.

Everyone has seen this picture. You see the despair and uncertainty in her eyes. This picture is what you all fear becoming. Unfortunately, we must all go through this when everything changes.

It won’t be some new political ideology or a strongman leader or even a natural disaster that catalyzes our unraveling. No, it’s our own invention. Artificial intelligence and humanoid robots are on the rise, and by the end of 2025, everyone will see the writing on the wall.

I’m not talking about an AI Doomsday narrative, where AI rises up and slays its creators. While those notions are romantic, visually striking, and imminently plausible (we’ve all seen Terminator and The Matrix and Ultron), the reality is that our world is ending in a much subtler way. For that’s what all those stories were: eschatological myths. The Bible gave us Revelations, the Norse gave is Ragnarök.

When the Soviet Union disintegrated, Russia “deaths from despair” skyrocketed. The Russian Dream was dead. To them, it was the end of times—the final play of their narrative of Soviet Communism, but more broadly, it was every eschatological fear made real.

Deep down, that’s what every American is afraid of.

Klaus Schwab, of World Economic Forum fame (or infamy, depending on who you ask) has called this era the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Never before have we seen the inevitable confluence of so many transformative technologies at once. Sure, in the 19th century, we had steam, steel, and electricity. Not to undersell those, but today we have AI, robotics, quantum, fusion, genetics, and nanotech. Ray Kurzweil say’s we’re approaching the “Singularity”—the Omega point beyond which all predictions are impossible. The reason predictions are impossible is because each one of these technologies alone would have transformative repercussions to humanity.

“The Industrial Revolution made human strength irrelevant; AI will make human intelligence irrelevant.” ~ Geoffrey Hinton “Godfather of AI” and Nobel Laureate

But they are coming as a wave.

Have you ever had a dream where you’re stuck on a beach and a tidal wave is coming? Tsunami dreams are incredibly common, and they usually represent the feeling of absolute overwhelm, a fear of forces (natural or otherwise) far beyond our control, on an inexorable collision course with our lives, and there’s nothing you can do.

Memes like this are a social coordination tool; we use them to build consensus. Yes, we all agree. This is what’s happening. AI’s progress is reaching a fever pitch and it is not slowing down for anyone.

Some people react to this with maximalist doomsday prophecy—that AI will surely slip our control and kill everyone. Even worse, it might torture us for all eternity! But if we discard the specifics and look at the metaphor, the doomers are actually right.

AI is already beyond our collective control. USA, China, and now Europe and India are developing AI at breakneck speed. We could no more stop the proliferation of AI than we could stop the weather, the moon, and the tides. We’ve already lost control. And yes, AI will absolutely end civilization as we know it. Will it be the dramatic nuclear detonation that fried Sarah Connor at the beginning of Terminator 2?

No, what we’re in for is far more dramatic and far more drawn out.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution will indeed shatter everything we are familiar with. Just as farmers in the 1930’s had to face the eschaton of their era—the final breaking of the agrarian America they knew and loved, and faced the music of a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing nation, so too will we go through this cycle of death and rebirth.

The final cathartic paroxysms are coming, likely by 2030, give or take a few years. People, due to normalcy bias, will keep doubling down on the current paradigm. Better the devil you know. Eventually, though, we’ll all come to consensus: this is no longer working. Sometimes, once societies are at this collective realization, they throw the baby out with the metaphorical bathwater. Think Stalinism and Maoism. The Old Guard was figurately burned at the stake and then millions more died during the transition.

We Americans, fortunately, have already gone through several such transitions with a fraction of the blood spilled as some other nations. Past performance is no guarantee of future behavior, but at least we have some priors. The American Civil War showed that we could come back from the brink, stronger than ever. The Industrial Revolution showed that we could lean into the change and pivot. World Wars, Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, Oil Shocks—a century of catastrophe was also anchored by the golden age of the 1950’s and 1960’s—the high times that come after the dark night of the soul.

There are two types of disintegration that are approaching.

The first is the “outer world” disintegration. Everything we think we know about how the world works; jobs, economics, politics, geopolitics, and even the very technology we rely on. All of that will come apart and be remade. Remember the Brendan Fraser movie Blast from the Past or even Bill and Ted? When you take someone out of their time, they struggle to adapt. There was even an episode of Star Trek where three survivors of a deep sleep ship wake up and all react in very different ways. The businessman is angry and confused that he has no money. The young mother grieves that she never saw her children grow up. The musician is just grateful that his terminal cirrhosis was cured and he can keep playing music.

What if reality isn’t what you think it is? What if you wake up one day and find that all your assumptions are wrong? This is called “ontological shock” and if you haven’t gone through it already, buckle up.

The most dramatic version of this story, “the world you think you know is a lie” was when Neo woke up after taking the red pill in The Matrix. This outer world transformation is inevitable at this point. Our society is arranged in such a way to not only tolerate, but encourage “creative destruction”. Creative destruction is the process by which diesel tractors replaced oxen, and that cars replaced horses, and that automated switchboards replaced operators. Creative destruction is not automatic—there have been countless societies throughout history that resisted innovation and change. And in all cases, those societies failed in the long run. America, in particular, is optimized for create destruction; everything from corporate personhood to billionaire tax incentives are designed to encourage paradigm-breaking innovation.

The second, and more painful disintegration, is the inner journey of death and rebirth. We saw this in Dune Part 2 where both Paul and Jessica drank from the Water of Life, a psychedelic worm poison that forced them to pass through the veil of mortality, and confront their fates. Our individual transformations might not be quite so dramatic, and many people simple won’t transform. They will fight angrily against the world that is increasingly alien to them as new values and lifestyles arise. We’ve seen this play out, particularly in the form of Boomers, who keep wishing and praying for the “good old days”, wistfully sentimental for a time that never really existed.

The Neo-Luddite movement is already preparing to live in the 2010’s forever. My reaction to this is: why in God’s name would you want to stay there, of all places? Then there’s the E/ACC (Effective Accelerationism) movement, which wants to go ahead and get it over with.

Imagine the accountant whose identity was built around precision, control, and reliability. When AI rendered her job obsolete, she felt as if her very identity evaporated overnight. But after a painful grieving process, she rediscovered her passion for writing poetry—a previously unthinkable pivot. Her darkest hour became her rebirth.

I’ve gone through this catharsis, this death and rebirth cycle, and it was far more painful than it needed to be. I clung to my corporate job for too long, then I clung to dreams of business success for too long. Burnout and chronic illness were my harshest teachers. Finally, I reoriented to this new world. I switched from the mentality of “life is a river, rushing from one milestone to the next, a linear narrative” to the mentality of “life is a garden, where you tend multiple areas in parallel, and while there is no final goal, the principle is abundance. It constantly evolves.”

What did this mean for me? I now spend my days writing, teaching, taking my dogs to the dog park and hiking (when I’m not sick). I don’t write code anymore, I don’t manage data centers, and I don’t attend boring meetings. I cook and clean with my wife, and live very much in the moment. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

If you haven’t already, you too will need to go through your own darkest hour. Maybe you’ll lose your job and have to reinvent yourself. Maybe your identity is pegged to your abilities, which will soon be eclipsed by machines, and you’ll need to reconstruct your self of self-worth. Perhaps you’ll be forced to move to a new location or even your family will fall apart as these things change.

But, like every story before ours, we will come through this crucible forever changes. New outlooks, new paradigms, new ways of being. I went into the innermost cave to confront my darkest fears, and one day so shall you. I leave you with one final pearl of wisdom: the hard part about change… is that you actually have to change.