Skynet Doom has Given Way: 6 New (and more realistic) AI "Doom" Narratives

The "AI will kill everyone" crowd is finally simmering down as they cried wolf and trusted their imaginations. Instead, people are worried about jobs, weapons, and wealth inequality.

I hadn’t heard much from the “Doomers” for a while and so I was under the impression that this movement was dying out. I checked with my audiences on YouTube and X, and ran a poll. Now, my audience is preselected for techno-optimism so take this with a grain of salt, but it’s a bit of data to go along with vibes:

Ouch. Only 21% of my audience gets the sense that Doom conversations are growing.

Now, the most salient comments from these threads revealed something I didn’t quite expect: Doom conversations are evolving, not dying out.

Top comment:

“Skynet doom is waning, but unemployment doom is stable” ~ @oliverd.1458

That quotation struck me as particularly insightful. So I copied all the comments from X and YouTube and asked Claude to distill the list down to the new forms of doom. Here’s what we got:

1. Economic Doom—Fear of job displacement, economic disruption, and how society will function

2. Power/Control Doom—Concerns about technofeudalism, corporate/elite control of AI, and loss of human agency

3. Societal Readiness Doom—Worry about lack of preparation and planning for AI transition

4. Human Obsolescence Doom—Fear of humans losing capabilities and relevance (creative, cognitive, etc.)

5. Regulatory Doom—Concerns about uncontrolled AI development, especially in military/dangerous applications

6. Progress Anxiety—More generalized concern about AI advancement and its implications (less apocalyptic than traditional doom scenarios)

Now these seem more reasonable, so let’s unpack them.

Economic Doom

The “economic doom” anxiety breaks down across a few dimensions:

• Mass unemployment across all skill levels

• Economic systems becoming obsolete

• Questions about who will buy products if nobody has jobs

• Concerns about wealth concentration

• Uncertainty about transition period management

Let’s take these one at a time. First, is mass unemployment. For a while, people were in denial; AI can never take my job! But every few months, we get huge leaps forward in AI and robotics capability, and what was once ontological shock is now the dawning realization that nobody’s job is safe.

The second and third points are pretty similar: what if all our current assumptions about economics (labor for wages, inflation, consumer demand) just fall apart? This is what I’ve been working on with my Post-Labor Economics theory. It’s not a simple or short topic, but the anxiety is real.

Next up is about the rich getting richer. Venture capitalists keep giving people like Sam Altman more money to build eyeball scanning orbs and data centers. So in an AI-driven future, does that mean Sam Altman ends up with all the toys? His tone-deaf blog post recently suggested that he would give everyone a “compute budget” which smacks of elites giving us poor plebs an “allowance” that we should just be grateful for, rather than owning the compute.

https://x.com/DaveShapi/status/1888905647191916696

Finally, much of my audience does seem to agree that things will be better…in the long run. But the rough period will be getting from here to there. When I run polls, people do generally agree that “it will get worse before it gets better.”

Power/Control Doom

This “power doom” breaks down along a few interesting dimensions:

• Tech leaders and corporations monopolizing AI power

• Loss of democratic control over resources

• Small elite controlling automated infrastructure

• Corporate interests overriding public good

• Tech companies “selling out” humanity

This is more direct “cyberpunk” vibes—high tech, low life.

It’s not difficult to imagine corporate hegemony and global tech elites consolidating power forever. Particularly after Sam spent the better part of 2024 globe trotting and speaking directly to almost every world leader.

We may be heading for a “Ghost in the Shell” kind of future.

You’ve probably heard terms like “regulatory capture” bandied about. For better or worse, we now have a president in the White House who is very much on the deregulation and compete with China train. I personally think this is better than strangling innovation with self-aggrandizing regulations.

It’s a sort of catch-22 though. Damned if you regulate, damned if you don’t.

If you don’t regulate, then corporations are free to do whatever. If you do regulate, corporations will pull up the ladder behind them. So what’s the answer? Open source is a partial answer, but it still requires a huge amount of resources to train AI models, and robots aren’t cheap either. It all comes down to economies of scale.

You might wonder “when can we get rid of corporations?” And the answer might be “never.” Here’s why: what is the purpose of a corporation?

It’s pretty straight forward:

1. A corporation provides goods and services to the market

2. It does so by organizing labor and capital

Right now, corporations are the most “efficient*” way to do this. Microsoft just spent nearly two decades and billions of dollars on their Majorana 1 quantum computing chip. Open source cannot do this.

So, for the foreseeable future, we’re still stuck in a codependent relationship with corporations.

*the larger a corporation is, the less efficient it is at innovation. The reasoning is very simple: innovation is risky, and it’s hard to pivot a big company. See: Google.

Societal Readiness Doom

This one is pretty straight forward: as people read the writing on the wall, a few obvious problems percolate up:

• Lack of planning from leadership

• No clear transition strategy

• Public unawareness of coming changes

• Insufficient policy preparation

• Absence of social safety nets for disruption

We’re just not ready. We still have Senators who don’t use email. Europe is burying its head in the sand, with a bunch of self-congratulatory and unrealistic regulations. No one in the halls of power seem to be contemplating that AI will dislocate all workers.

JD Vance, our Vice President, was just in Paris explicitly saying that AI won’t take jobs, it will create new jobs.

Lots of people have lots of doubts.

I don’t think there’s much more to say on this one, honestly.

Human Obsolescence Doom

This is one where I vehemently disagree with my audience. Let’s unpack the components of this one though:

• Loss of creative capabilities

• Cognitive atrophy

• Humans becoming irrelevant in work

• Loss of purpose and meaning

• AI surpassing human capabilities across all domains

The only points I agree with are becoming irrelevant (which is a good thing) and surpassing human capabilities (also a good thing). Let’s start there.

If you want to get to “Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism” then, by definition, you must become irrelevant at work and automation (AI and robots) must be superior to you.

My inner Tony Stark whenever people are afraid of getting replaced by machines. Bro, how do you think we get to Star Trek utopia?

Now, let’s tackle the other ones: cognitive and creative atrophy, plus a loss of meaning and purpose. First, I have personally found all of these to be exactly the opposite of what has happened. Here are some examples:

• I am infinitely more creative now with AI. I don’t just write, I make music and graphic art as well. I have one novel published and 3 more in my universe underway, plus two fanfics. I’m looking forward to when I can make them directly into animated films.

• I am learning again at a high velocity. Just yesterday I was using Grok 3 to learn about prime number theory and cryptography. Will everyone use AI to do this? Probably not, but who cares? Enough of us will, and many of us just love to learn for its own sake, rather than utilitarian outcomes.

• As far as meaning and purpose, I am actually finding that I have more purpose in my life as AI rises—right now my main purpose is what you’re seeing right now: to help humanity understand and prepare for what’s coming. I’m also looking forward to the day I can build a homestead and give my artistic niece a loft and chickens, and that will be our lifestyle. A modern little house on the prairie.

What I will concede is that transitioning from the “life as a river” to “life as a garden” can be difficult. I recently wrote about it here on Substack.

Regulatory Doom

This one is fun.

• Uncontrolled military AI development

• Lack of safety oversight

• Deregulation concerns

• Dangerous applications being developed

• No international control framework

And my only response is “yeah, we live in an anarchic world. Next question?”

My phlegmatic response to the Military Industrial Complex is because, well, I understand geopolitics, history, and economics. I don’t like it, but I see why it’s inevitable. For more, I highly recommend reading books like The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Vulture Capitalism, Principles for the Changing World Order, and Why Nations Fail.

I asked Grok 3 to synthesize this next part for me, basically a cliff’s notes version of those four books:

The fears encapsulated in “Regulatory Doom”—uncontrolled military AI development, lack of safety oversight, and the absence of an international control framework—find a sobering foundation in the arguments of books like The Tragedy of Great Power Politics by John Mearsheimer, Vulture Capitalism by Grace Blakeley, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio, and Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. Mearsheimer’s work articulates why we live in an “anarchic world”: the international system lacks a central authority to enforce rules, leaving states to prioritize survival and power. In this realist view, military escalation and AI arms races are inevitable because nations, driven by distrust and the need for security, must outpace rivals technologically—especially in transformative fields like AI. Historical patterns of great powers jockeying for dominance, from industrial revolutions to nuclear arms, suggest that AI will be no different; it’s a tool too potent to leave unclaimed, ensuring geopolitical competition remains the name of the game.

Meanwhile, Vulture Capitalism and Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order highlight the economic and cyclical forces amplifying this dynamic. Blakeley critiques how corporations, intertwined with state interests, exploit technological edges for profit and influence, often outpacing regulatory efforts—think of AI-driven surveillance or autonomous weapons as modern analogs. Dalio’s framework of historical cycles shows how rising powers (e.g., China) and declining ones (e.g., the U.S.) clash during transitions, with innovations like AI becoming flashpoints for supremacy. Why Nations Fail ties this to governance: inclusive institutions might temper reckless AI development, but extractive regimes—common in powerful states—prioritize elite control over safety, fueling unchecked military applications. Together, these works suggest that the “anarchic world” persists because no nation trusts another to disarm, economic incentives align with escalation, and power vacuums invite exploitation—leaving regulatory doom not just plausible, but a structural inevitability for the foreseeable future.

This outlook is very grim, however, I do see some glimmers of hope. We can overhaul democratic systems with blockchain and, as Marcus Aurelius said, let the obstacle be the way. AI will break a lot of things, but it is also an opportunity to rebuild the state as we know it.

In the long run, I do think that the “exocortex” will evolve to the point that nations, as we understand them today, will cease to exist. If corporations exist to organize capital and labor, then why do nations exist? States exist to establish order, provide security, and manage resources within a defined territory, often emerging and persisting through the need to resolve conflicts, defend against external threats, and regulate economic and social cooperation among diverse groups.

Well, I personally think that a blockchain and AI based society would probably supersede our current agrarian operating system that uses a Congress and paper ballots. There are better ways to resolve conflicts, defend against threats, and regulate economic and social cooperation. We just need to mature and implement those technologies.

Thus, in the long run, I think we’ll end up with a very peaceful, cooperative planet running on a substrate of AI, blockchain, and robotics. And this “exocortex” will carry out the collective will of humanity without concentration of wealth and power. But I’m also a Star Trek utopian.

Progress Anxiety

The hard part about change is that it requires change. This is the general unease that comes when you no longer trust the ground you stand on.

• General unease about pace of change

• Uncertainty about AI’s ultimate capabilities

• Concerns about maintaining control

• Worry about unintended consequences

• Fear of the unknown future

This is where psychedelics come in. I’m not even joking. No, I’m not saying “everyone should go trip balls immediately!” But what I am saying is that having been on my own transformational journey, including with the aid of psychedelics, you do get comfortable taking a leap into the void. Our chimpanzee brains do not like sudden, large scale change.

We evolved in a “local and geometric” world that was highly predictable. If bad weather was coming, you could see it, hear it, and smell it. If there was a predator, you could stab it with a pointy stick. If you were hungry, you could go looking for food. We had direct agency even though the world was big and scary.

Today? The winds of change are rising, but you cannot hear it, see it, smell it, or stab it. There’s nothing you can do to alter this global and exponential change. So what does that do? It sets our limbic systems on edge.

This is why you see behavior like people destroying autonomous vehicles. Our primate brains say “New thing spooky, attack new thing.” It’s symbolic. We cannot shut down ChatGPT or stop OpenAI or Tesla.

But we can destroy a car. What you’re seeing here is primal instinct kicking in.

I’m not particularly worried because we’ve gone through this plenty of times. From agrarian farmers sabotaging wooden gears to people being afraid of telephones and trains, we will adapt. New technology will become normalized, and all these people will have looked very silly.

We can’t blame them. Technology, like this, is brand new in the evolutionary scale of our species. Even humans that have never seen fire get scared by it. We will adapt, but there will be some broken robots along the way.