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Why do we await with indifference the news that AI could wipe us out, and what is the way out of this nihilism?

2026-09-17 20:48:35Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA BRIGID DELANEY
Why do we await with indifference the news that AI could wipe us out, and what
Thriving means having a direct relationship with the natural world, not experiencing the world through a screen, or destroying and degrading nature itself to create more capacity for a screen-based existence.

The image of the future as almost completely bleak has somehow crept into the collective consciousness this year.

Last week I was having coffee with an old friend. He was telling me what he wanted his children to study when they went to university, when he suddenly stopped talking, stared off into space, and said, "I wish I had never had children."

He had been a father for 20 years and I had never heard him say something like that.

“Oh God, why?”

He loves his children immensely, but at that very moment he seemed desperate.

"Artificial Intelligence," he replied.

"What's wrong with her?"

At this point, it could be anything to do with AI. Would it take all the jobs his children could work, leaving them to live in poverty, without purpose or meaning? Or was the concern about the environment, with all the water and energy AI consumes, which will further worsen the climate and make the planet uninhabitable? Or was it the news that week that AI could “kill all humans” within the next ten years?

It was the latter. We talked for a while, dully, about this business of killing all the people, then moved on to something else. But the shadow had fallen, and I began to wonder: is the totality of the crises we face so overwhelming that we no longer even have the capacity to talk about them with a sense of urgency?

Instead, they are simply there, in the air, all around us, like pollution, where each particle contains its own doomsday scenario, and the only way to survive in this atmosphere is to become numb to it.

Currently, for many of us, all the decisions of the past and the future are being refracted through this strange and dark moment.

If you're middle-aged, it can manifest as it did for my friend: wishing, even for a moment, that you'd never brought children into this world. Or it can manifest as questioning whether it's worth continuing to work when you won't be able to enjoy a normal retirement.

If you're young, this manifests itself as the inability to choose a university major or a profession because you don't know which professions or trades will become obsolete in a few years. Or wondering if it's worth sacrificing and saving for a huge down payment on a house if you won't have a real job or a future that will allow you to repay a 30-year mortgage.

And if you're older, it comes across as gratitude that you won't be here to watch everything fall apart.

There are few answers, or ways out, of this nihilism we now face: and none will come from technology.

The first is to wake up. Usually, if someone were really trying to kill you, if they were breaking into your house and trying to take your life, you would fight back.

However, we await the news that Artificial Intelligence could cause the extinction of humanity with a numb, indifferent attitude.

We must remember that no one really asked for AI, and yet here it is, trying to kill us. And even if that is avoided, it is infiltrating our workplaces and our emotional lives (GPT may be the largest provider of mental health services in the US), stripping us of our ability to think critically and threatening economic and social sustainability.

Why are we so numb in the face of a threat that, for the moment, can be prevented?

This numbness may be a consequence of almost 20 years of smartphones and social media, during which, addicted to entertainment, our attention spans have been shortened and, through personalized algorithms, our ability to organize and act collectively has been weakened.

Or the cause could be the extraordinary political power of technology companies, which makes all of us, including governments, feel powerless or have fallen under the control of the tech giants.

It may even be that the onslaught of this thing, this progress, the Last Invention, seems inevitable to us and that, as in the case of the Luddites attacking the factories, any resistance is, ultimately, futile.

The next solution, once we wake up, is to get back to fundamental principles. What are the ingredients of human flourishing? When we can articulate this, we will have a rope that can guide us back to where we need to be.

Human flourishing is not about having a critically thinking machine in your place, but experiencing the pleasure and pain of figuring things out for yourself.

Flourishing is relationships between people, in which we care for each other and help each other grow. It's not talking to a big language model for 18 hours a day about your personal problems.

Thriving means having a direct relationship with the natural world, not experiencing the world through a screen, or destroying and degrading nature itself to create more capacity for a screen-based existence.

These are all things worth fighting for. Technology has a place in our world. But when we start hearing that it could destroy our world, we need to wake up, shake off that sense of numbness, and start fighting back.

*Brigid Delaney is the author of five books, including "The Seeker and the Sage"


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