SUSPICIOUS MINDS

[00:00:00] SEAN KING OGRADY: In 1958, Daniel Ellsberg began working at the RAND Corporation as an analyst in nuclear strategy, where he specialized in command and control, specifically looking into the question of who actually had authority to launch nuclear weapons and under what conditions. He held the highest security clearances available and was essentially auditing the entire US nuclear infrastructure.

[00:00:27] He was so good at this job that he was brought into the Kennedy Pentagon as a consultant to the Secretary of Defense, which gave him access to the administration's actual all-out nuclear war plans. And remember, this is at the absolute peak of tensions between the US and Russia in the Cold War. At that moment, a decade before making the decision to release the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was faced with another seemingly more simple decision.

[00:00:54] In his new hire paperwork, there was a standard box to check in order to receive his future pension from [00:01:00] RAND. Ellsberg didn't bother to check it because given what he knew about the tense and somewhat haphazardly organized global nuclear situation, he believed he'd never live long enough to receive it.

[00:01:11] Think about that. He didn't bother checking a box on a standardized form to receive money for the rest of his life after he retired because he believed the world would certainly end before he could retire. Humanity would be over before he hit 65. In 2026, Elon Musk similarly recommended that people not bother saving for their retirement.

[00:01:34] He believes it won't matter because productivity increases resulting from artificial intelligence will lead to universal high income, abundance, or some other tech utopia that obviates any need for pedestrian financial considerations, like being able to pay for your kids braces or even groceries. The world will be saved before we retire.

[00:01:53] Humanity will be a techno utopia. Now, this is kind of the same story, but with different [00:02:00] existential disruptions. When we talk about the end of the world, there's almost always a happy ending and a sad ending, endless death or eternal life. The commonality is a moment of revelation from which the world can never be what it once was.

[00:02:17] Welcome to season two of Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse.

[00:02:27] Quick note before getting into today's episode. We've been working on this series for a while, and about a week before this episode was to be released in May 2026, the Pope weighed in on artificial intelligence and specifically brought questions about AI into the purview of religious thought. The Pope outlined his concerns and ideas in an encyclical entitled Magnifica Humanitas.

[00:02:51] An encyclical, by the way, is like a fancy pope letter, and this all could not possibly be more relevant to this series. This episode in particular [00:03:00] is about how religious thinking and the psychology of the apocalypse are connected. The Pope reinforced the core concerns of this series: the existential threat of AI, its potential to diminish what it means to be human, and what human flourishing actually looks like.

[00:03:15] And to land all of this even more at the very specific intersections of my personal interest, he even invoked Peter Thiel, whose ideas about the Antichrist we will get into later. And he brought up J.R.R. Tolkien, who is evoked constantly throughout this series and in any conversation anyone has with me.

[00:03:34] And by coordinating this announcement with one of the cofounders of Anthropic, the Pope has, in a very strange way, centered again the issue of AI hype. What better hype than to say your tech is so powerful it can only be understood through theological inquisition? Maybe this isn't all hype. Maybe we really have developed technology or stumbled upon a technology that will force us to ask the big questions and [00:04:00] maybe find answers we're really uncomfortable with.

[00:04:02] So special shout out to good friend of the pod, Pope Leo XIV, whose comments we will return to throughout the series. Before we get too deep into it, quick reminder to follow and subscribe depending on where you're listening or watching, so you don't miss an episode or any updates. And if you enjoy the show, please give us a rating.

[00:04:20] We truly appreciate your support. Also, if there's anything you've been wondering about that sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence and the human mind and you'd like to see us look into it, drop us a line on socials or in the comments. Okay, back to the show. In this episode, we're exploring the historical and psychological origins of apocalyptic thinking.

[00:04:41] We discussed the evolving meaning of the word apocalypse in our last episode, but I also want to do a quick refresher here because the concept is so central to our discussion. I spoke with writer and Carnegie Mellon professor Ed Simon on the definition of apocalypse 

[00:04:58] ED SIMON: Literally from the Greek, [00:05:00] it implies like an unveiling or a, a revealing of secret truths.

[00:05:06] It has come to mean the end of the world, I think, in popular parlance, and it's certainly been associated with that because the term has been in scriptural and pseudepigraphical literature, has been applied to kind of the unveiling of truths about the end of the world. But strictly speaking, apocalypse is not synonymous with that per se.

[00:05:27] That's more of a kind of cultural accumulation that it has acquired over the centuries. 

[00:05:33] SEAN KING OGRADY: And here's James Cussin, philosopher and creator of a thought-provoking YouTube channel you should definitely check out called The Living Philosophy, further discussing what it means in a contemporary context. 

[00:05:46] JAMES CUSSEN: It's the, the idea of judgment day in some, in some variety, the day of reckoning when beyond which this world is no more.

[00:05:56] The singularity, uh, is, is a good way of framing the [00:06:00] way I think about, uh, apocalypse. 

[00:06:03] SEAN KING OGRADY: We'll go way deeper into the singularity in a later episode, but basically singularity refers to the moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and begins improving itself at a rate we can no longer predict or control.

[00:06:19] JAMES CUSSEN: The singularity is a point beyond which we can no longer see this world, whether that's in a Christian, uh, sense of, you know, Jesus comes back and then this world is at a literal end, or, yeah, the, the rapture of the nerds in the, the technological singularity, or however you frame it. 

[00:06:36] SEAN KING OGRADY: Yeah, I love that term you used, rapture of the nerds.

[00:06:39] Can you dig a little deeper on that for me? 

[00:06:41] JAMES CUSSEN: You tend to think of nerds as being part of this secular post-religious kind of society, but the way they talk about the singularity is very much, uh, this kind of religious idea and, and the rapture is going to come, and you can see Sam Altman has said that A- AGI or AI is either going to be the best thing ever or the [00:07:00] worst thing ever.

[00:07:00] And so it's this uncertainty which is within the, the Christian idea of the rapture. 

[00:07:08] SEAN KING OGRADY: I wanna explore the last thing James said. It's important. The AI apocalypse, like all apocalypses, is going to be the best thing ever or the worst thing ever, Christ or Antichrist. The world will be one of limitless wealth and abundance, or one of endless fire and pestilence.

[00:07:26] Either way, don't worry about your 401because you're not going to need it. We hear it over and over, and we tend to believe it despite every doomsday prophet so far having been wrong. In fact, Wikipedia currently lists 216 predicted dates for the apocalypse. The dates for 195 of them are already in the past.

[00:07:45] A link is in the show notes. It's actually a really fun read. One of my favorite famously wrong prophets is a guy by the name of William Miller. Here's apocalyptic art expert Dorian Lynskey to tell us all about William Miller. 

[00:07:58] DORIAN LYNSKEY: During the Second Great [00:08:00] Awakening in the early 19th century America, uh, just a massive explosion of millenarian sects.

[00:08:07] Do you end up getting the, um, you get Jehovah's Witnesses, and you get the Mormons, and you get Seventh Day Adventists. 

[00:08:13] SEAN KING OGRADY: Okay, quick note here because this gets a little confusing. We're talking about William Miller, and Dorian just used the term millenarianism. Though they sound very oddly similar, these are distinct words.

[00:08:26] It's not Millerism, it's millenarianism, and we'll define what that means in a second You've been using the term millenarianism. Can you tell me what that refers to? 

[00:08:38] DORIAN LYNSKEY: Well, it comes from the concept of the millennium in, in Revelation. People would think that you, you have the Battle of Armageddon, and then you have the end of the world.

[00:08:46] Actually, between Armageddon and the end of the world is 1,000 years of, you know, sort of close to sort of paradise on Earth and the, the reign of Christ on Earth when Satan has been banished, [00:09:00] and then at the end of that thousand years, Satan comes back, and there's another battle, and then he is finally defeated, and then the world ends.

[00:09:07] So millenarian refers to, to that sort of belief in the, in, in apocalyptic narratives. Uh, but then there's disagreement about when the millennium is. Is it taking place now? There was a guy called William Miller. He had calculated the end of the world. He kinda kept the date quite vague, and then one of his followers made it more precise, and Miller went along with it because he was getting so many followers.

[00:09:32] It was a g- sort of an early case of, like, audience capture, where the more people that follow you, the more, um, extreme you get. And everybody's there awaiting the end, and it doesn't come, and so he recalculates and goes, "Ah, no, no," and this is all, you know, going back through the Bible and this code and what I think this date means and so on.

[00:09:51] So then there's another date, and then that is called the Great Disappointment because then people were like, "Oh, this is just wrong. This is not, it's [00:10:00] not happening." 

[00:10:02] SEAN KING OGRADY: The Great Disappointment. I just love this so much. And just to make this perfectly clear, William Miller gets all these followers. They believe the world's going to end.

[00:10:12] They sell their possessions. They give their money away. The world doesn't end. Everyone then still follows him. He then predicts a different day at which he believes the world will end. The world then doesn't end, and that is called the Great Disappointment. I just, I just think this is so incredible. All right, back to Dorian.

[00:10:33] DORIAN LYNSKEY: I mean, there were lots of stories of people just giving away all their money and, and climbing up onto a hill dressed in white robes, awaiting the end. 

[00:10:43] SEAN KING OGRADY: Millerites giving away all their money and possessions because they were confident the world was ending is not terribly dissimilar from Daniel Ellsberg and Elon Musk's dismissal of prudent financial planning.

[00:10:53] Why do we constantly make these predictions? And more importantly, why do people listen? [00:11:00] Before moving into the idiosyncrasies of the artificial intelligence flavor of apocalyptic thinking, I wanna spend a little time on the psychology of apocalyptic thinking in general. Why do our brains do this? What role does it serve?

[00:11:13] Do we need to think this way? How do we distinguish real danger and harm from run-of-the-mill doomsday fantasizing, which we seem to have some innate proclivity towards? But first, because apocalypticism finds some of its origins in religious thinking, I wanna begin there to see what the religious framing may reveal about our psychology.

[00:11:32] Here's Dorian Lynskey again on humans' apocalyptic thinking. 

[00:11:37] DORIAN LYNSKEY: So it seems to have started, and I say seems because we're, we're really going so far back that historians just cannot, uh, be 100% on this, but it seems to have started with the, with the Zoroastrians in Persia. 

[00:11:53] SEAN KING OGRADY: Zoroastrianism is a religion that's over 3,000 years old.

[00:11:57] It's truly an ancient religion and is still practiced today [00:12:00] by over 100,000 people. One of its primary features is an eschatological outlook in which its uncreated creator, Ahura Mazda, defeats all evil in the world. 

[00:12:12] DORIAN LYNSKEY: uh, with the Zoroastrians in Persia. And the prophet Zoroaster seems to have been the first kind of influential religious leader who suggested that time was a straight line, beginning, middle, end, as opposed to other religions in which it was a cycle.

[00:12:30] For example, in Hinduism and the Kali Yuga, there is a phase of great destruction that we would recognize as apocalyptic. But then that kind of the wheel turns and then you get this boat of rebirth and it goes around and around. So that's more what we might think of as Noah's flood in Genesis. You know, the, the world is virtually entirely wiped out, but it's also wiped clean and there are survivors and they rebuild humanity.

[00:12:55] That, that's more of that sort of cyclical idea. And then [00:13:00] Zoroaster's view of history finds its way somehow into Judaism and therefore Christianity. And so the end of the world becomes a concept that makes sense. 

[00:13:13] SEAN KING OGRADY: I once again spoke with Professor of Divinity Judith Wolfe about how the apocalyptic tradition became so embedded in Western religious traditions.

[00:13:23] JUDITH WOLFE: Christianity inherits from Judaism a sense that because the world as a whole, uh, did not come into being haphazardly or incidentally, but as the creation of a loving divine creator, therefore it stands to reason or we must assume that he created with some kind of purpose. So a belief in a creator God also implies a belief in some sort of purposefulness of creation.

[00:13:53] And that immediately raises the question, well, is that purpose all fulfilled in what's already there, or do we see in the whole of [00:14:00] history, is history part of that divine purpose? In which case, how do we interpret the course of history? The Eastern religions actually, much like the classical religions in Greece and Rome, are much more cyclical or non-directional in character.

[00:14:15] The expectation that something will lead to an apocalypse, a cataclysmic event, a cataclysmic change, is just not as anchored in those traditions as it is in us. Whereas we have inherited, and we've inherited specifically from Christianity and alongside that from Judaism, a paradigm of historical development in which the expectation of an, an apocalypse is almost inevitable 

[00:14:46] SEAN KING OGRADY: This idea of inevitability is important, especially when we consider the language around AI.

[00:14:51] Tech companies are justifiably taking risks because the technology is supposedly inevitable, so they might as well be the ones to do it. So we actually hear this over [00:15:00] and over, that this technology is, is inevitable. Someone's going to do it. If we don't do it, the Chinese will do it. If Anthropic doesn't do it, OpenAI will do it.

[00:15:06] And each party seems to think they're the one who will do right by society and right by the technology. And since it's inevitable anyways, somebody might as well do it and somebody might as well profit from it. Okay, back to Judith, who from this inevitable apocalyptic tradition distinguishes between two distinct lines of thought and how they relate to artificial intelligence 

[00:15:29] JUDITH WOLFE: Throughout our entire history, since the dawn of Christianity, our expectation has always been for developments for-- okay, so can I go into this in a little more detail?

[00:15:42] This is actually really interesting. Okay, so I think what we have in the Western paradigm is a really interesting duality or tension between the messianic and utopian. The first is what we might call utopianism, but on the one hand, a basic sense that the world is [00:16:00] moving towards an end in a benign sense.

[00:16:02] So, uh, a sense of almost teleology, uh, a sense that history has a purpose. History is moving towards a fulfillment, a new creation, which in some sense is the fulfillment or the consummation of the purpose that was already, always already inherent in the world. That second vision is more associated with what we might call messianism.

[00:16:24] The sense of history is, in a sense, always, always falling short, always veering towards disaster or catastrophe, from which only a kind of messianic force, whether that's something that's seen as coming radically from the outside, from God, or from a particularly strong political leader, some kind of messianic force has to wrest us from this course of self-destruction.

[00:16:49] Both really are anchored in parts of the Christian tradition that are in some sense in tension with each other, but that have also always worked together in some way. The positive version of this [00:17:00] is people who think that, that AI is and can, in some sense, be the messianic force that has been hoped for.

[00:17:08] And people who do that often emphasize the organic dimensions of human existence as the forces of decay. So, you know, they see the potential of human intelligence in our, in our minds and our mental functions, and they see those as constantly threatened and indeed thwarted by our organic bodies, which always tend towards death and decay and illness.

[00:17:33] And so in a sense, in that narrative, there's both a strong sense of potential, of upward trajectory, of infinite possibility, and the sense that that's always hampered by the inherent limitations of our human organic existence, and therefore of AI as a possible leap in evolution or a possible messianic force that can, that can overcome the forces that have held us back.

[00:17:57] So that's, uh, in a sense, a, [00:18:00] an almost traditional messianic utopian account 

[00:18:06] SEAN KING OGRADY: So Judith is describing a theological architecture. Dr. Amy Levy maps the psychological one. Amy is the chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association's Commission on Artificial Intelligence, and she studies how human beings organize themselves psychologically around a force they find both terrifying and potentially really exciting.

[00:18:27] She describes our response to AI through a psychoanalyst named Wilfred Bion, who studied how groups behave when they're frightened. And one of the three patterns he identified has a very specific name. 

[00:18:40] DR AMY LEVY: I think about there's a psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion, who I really like, and he studied groups. And at one point, he identified that human beings, when we're frightened, we tend to organize around three basic assumptions.

[00:18:53] One, he called a dependency basic assumption, another he called a pairing basic assumption, and another a fight-flight. [00:19:00] And I think we can really see this around AI. So the dependency is, you know, just suckling on that AI breast, you know, just completely dependent. This is the answer to everything. Thank God it's here.

[00:19:13] No, no questioning, no complexity, just receptivity and, and belief that, that it will take care of us. Then you have the fight or flight. This is terrible. We have to... You know, it will destroy who we are essentially. It will destroy our way of life. We must fight it or, or we'll just duck our heads into the sand.

[00:19:35] And then the pairing, you know, where there's this sort of looking at innovators, looking at AI creators with a kind of messianic hope that they will give us, you know, something, you know, th-through, through their genius and their collaborations. You know, they're gonna give birth to this child, you know, this new life that will be the solution.

[00:19:55] You can see this over time, different ways in which people organize around these things. [00:20:00] Bion's idea was that the alternative to all of this, that's all fear-based thinking and fear-based organization. The alternative to it, what we want, is something that he called a work group, which is people coming together as much as possible in the reality of what's happening and allowing for reality-based thinking.

[00:20:19] The way I think about that is, yes, let's own that we don't want to die. Yes, let's own that we have a lot of power. We are the most powerful being on this planet. Let's, let's take that seriously and, and stay grounded with all of this, not get pulled into these anxious-based, you know, organizations and, and keep working.

[00:20:42] It's really about working and developing, accepting that everything is transient. We will not be able to hold on to life as we've known it. It's just not going to happen. So let's get busy working on building something for the future. [00:21:00] 

[00:21:00] SEAN KING OGRADY: Intrinsic to messianic thinking is prediction. And this is a great time for me to tell you all about our sponsor, Polymarket.

[00:21:07] Just kidding. Anyway, James Custon and I discuss the relationship between apocalypse and prediction. And we'll actually get a lot deeper into this later, but this is a nice preview 

[00:21:19] JAMES CUSSEN: Predominantly in the West, been fixated on this idea of the end of the world being imminent and, and being immediate, and this, these were mostly Christian predictions going back to Jesus saying, you know, "Before I die," he said to the head Pharisee, uh, "Before I- before you die, the kingdom of Heaven will have come on Earth."

[00:21:38] So it's, it goes back to that, and then people were like, "Okay, so within the next 30, 40 years we're gonna have the end of the world." And then it kind of pushed out to 1000 AD, there was a lot of predictions, and then people going back to the Bible and making predictions. So the, it, because built into Christianity there was this idea of the end of the world, you get all of these predictions, and not just the [00:22:00] likes of Nostradamus, but you had popes making predictions, Columbus was weirdly making predictions, and this comes right up into the 18th and 19th centuries.

[00:22:09] I mean, you could continue to see it. Uh, you would expect that to have died off as Western society became more secular, but instead as the 19th century kind of came to an end and we came into the 20th century, it's like the, the idea of apocalypse has, has haunted us, uh, from world wars to Cold War and the threat of, like, nuclear devastation.

[00:22:28] And then as the th- threat of that died off with the, the fall of the Soviet Union, you would think, "Okay, maybe that was a, a period in history, but now we're, we're done with apocalyptic thinking." But then Y2K kind of emerged of like we're... Of, again, a calendar- a calendar-based fear, but, uh, Y2K's gonna come and it's gonna destroy the world in whatever technological way.

[00:22:50] Maybe there's something, we have a psychological need for apocalypse. Is there something quirky about human psychology that needs the end of the world, or that the [00:23:00] end of the world motivates things? 

[00:23:02] SEAN KING OGRADY: Now, while humans have been spectacularly, embarrassingly wrong about the end of the world for literally thousands of years, 195 times according to Wikipedia, and counting, I wanna talk about a prophet that has been eerily, almost supernaturally right about a lot of things.

[00:23:19] And I say supernaturally because there's genuinely no other word for it. This prophet is The Simpsons. In the year 2000, the writers of The Simpsons predicted that Donald Trump would one day be President of the United States. This was considered a joke, a throwaway gag. 16 years later, it was reality. In 1998, Homer Simpson stood at a chalkboard and scribbled an equation.

[00:23:43] That equation, when properly worked out by an actual physicist, and yes, someone actually did this, almost predicted the mass of the Higgs boson. The real Higgs boson, the so-called God particle, wasn't discovered until 2012, nearly 14 years later. [00:24:00] The Simpsons Movie depicted the NSA conducting mass surveillance of American citizens six years before Edward Snowden revealed to the world that this was actually happening.

[00:24:09] I could keep going. The Apple Watch, FaceTime, the FIFA corruption scandal, even Cypress Hill performing with the London Symphony Orchestra. But I think you get the idea. The punchline, of course, is that The Simpsons has been right about the future more times than any human prophet I've encountered in my research, and this is, this is across thousands of years of prophets.

[00:24:28] The Simpsons makes Nostradamus look like an amateur, truly, and they were doing it in the service of jokes. The whole point was that it was absurd, which makes you wonder, is the absurdity what makes it true? But here's the thing that actually keeps me up at night. There are Simpsons predictions that haven't come true, yet.

[00:24:46] In 1994, over 30 years ago, Itchy & Scratchy Land showed us an amusement park where the robots rose up and tried to kill all the humans. In 2012, Mr. Burns fired his entire workforce and replaced them with robots, who immediately went bad [00:25:00] and turned on Springfield. We don't have that, yet. The Simpsons also predicted hover cars, Mars colonization, and a world where artificial intelligence has made most human labor obsolete.

[00:25:11] These things haven't happened yet. Maybe they will, maybe not. But there's a psychological consistency I identify between The Simpsons prognostications, AI evangelicalism, and apocalyptic predictions. It's an effort to understand our place in the world by predicting the future. Throughout most of our history, this has been the exclusive domain of religious thought.

[00:25:35] Here's Judith Wohl again on how fundamental this need is for humans 

[00:25:41] JUDITH WOLFE: What we need as human beings, among other things, is ways to orient ourselves in the world. We need to know how to make sense of things, how to act, um, how to move in the world. And to do that, we put, you know, the many, many data points that are around us into [00:26:00] something like coherent systems, which to us seem simply out there.

[00:26:04] To us, it feels as if, you know, we're just seeing what's there, but actually, you know, what's constantly going on, uh, in our minds is the constant selection, interpretation, constellation of all of these infinite number of possible data points into a landscape, into a world that makes enough sense for us that we feel like we can get a handle on it, we can orient ourselves in it.

[00:26:28] And I think that, of course, to some extent, that is what religions do. That's what faith does. It's a way of understanding the world so that we can, uh, live in it. But of course, that's not exclusive to religions at all. Everybody does this all the time. 

[00:26:46] SEAN KING OGRADY: We do this all the time. Is there a psychological need for the apocalypse, as James asked?

[00:26:51] Does this need for orientation in a confusing world that Judith describes require religious thinking that, as we have now learned of Western religious [00:27:00] traditions, inevitably becomes apocalyptic? Are religious traditions simply responding to a fundamental human psychology? And are we simply porting those thoughts over to artificial intelligence?

[00:27:12] It's possible. To further explore the psychology of apocalyptic decision-making, I, of course, turn to Dr. Joel Gold Why might this be that for some people it's easier to think about the end of all lives as opposed to the end of their own life? 

[00:27:30] DR JOEL GOLD: When we're talking about the death of everyone, it sort of flattens it all out, right?

[00:27:36] It becomes this kind of conceptual thing, and this sounds however it sounds, but it's sort of like we're all in it together, you know? It's like no FOMO. There won't be people, so I'm not missing out on anything. Whereas my own mortality is a feeling. I think about it, and then I feel very strongly about it.

[00:27:58] But this notion of [00:28:00] apocalypse, maybe there's something almost, I think I'm gonna regret saying these things, but something almost romantic about it, like we're all going out together. 

[00:28:09] SEAN KING OGRADY: There's a lot of apocalyptic talk from the CEOs of the AI companies. In, in the same sentence, they'll say, "This technology could fix all of humanity's problems.

[00:28:20] This could create a new golden age for mankind unlike anything we've ever seen before, or it could end life on Earth." What might be happening with somebody psychologically who is so concerned about something ending the world that they change their life to reflect that concern, but still pushing forward to make the technology that they think might do it?

[00:28:42] What is that? 

[00:28:43] DR JOEL GOLD: There's this notion that Freud had called the death instinct. Freud believed that there was a drive to life and a drive to death, the notion of returning to an inorganic state, [00:29:00] a state of complete calm. He described the nirvana principle as opposed to the pleasure principle, where we just want everything to go back to total rest.

[00:29:11] And like everything that Freud talked about, war and conflict as people intrapsychically, it can be turned against the self, and that can be more problematic. This death drive can be turned also in a more outward fashion. Coming back to this notion of these people who have all this power, it really scares me because if one person who might have some desire to bring the world to a place of nirvana, bad things could happen.

[00:29:45] Um, this was his theory to explain what he called the repetition compulsion. 

[00:29:53] SEAN KING OGRADY: I also spoke with Casey Kelly from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He's the author of the appropriately titled [00:30:00] Apocalypse Man. Casey digs deeper into the death drive and what Dr. Gold means by repetition compulsion. 

[00:30:07] CASEY KELLY: Freud, he identified as something that escaped, uh, his understanding of the pleasure principle, and the pleasure principle is just the idea that our ego essentially tames our id, and our id is maybe, uh, has some more destructive impulses in it.

[00:30:22] Like if we just pursued everything that we wanted without thinking about restrictions or the possibility that it might cause damage to someone else or ourselves, if we didn't have some kind of restriction on that, then we couldn't preserve pleasure. We would just sort of run amok with desire. And so he me- he mentioned that there's this sort of regulatory device where we will sometimes restrict our pleasure to preserve it, and sometimes that even may be painful, like we have to delay gratification for something, or we have to restrict some impulse that may be dangerous to our own selfhood.

[00:30:51] And a lot of this came from his observation about people who were trauma victims, so he would look at this in like World War I. Uh, soldiers came back from [00:31:00] conflict and were kind of like living the comba- uh, conflict over and over and over again. What he observed in the death drive is that it's not a desire for death per se, but it's that we, um, are constantly trying to, uh, stage an encounter with an original loss, meaning like our, our...

[00:31:16] the self that existed prior to us becoming an actual person. It's not a desire for death, but it's a desire to be absent the tension between pain and pleasure because in that dynamic there's, right, a significant amount of, of, of tension that we can't seem to avoid. And so what we-- how do we manage it?

[00:31:35] Well, we repeat these experiences that are negative, but so that we can master those experiences, but we never can really master them, and that reflects the ways in which the kind of death drive plays itself out on a cultural level, too. Like people are repeating and simulating the end of the world over and over and over again.

[00:31:55] SEAN KING OGRADY: Simulating and repeating the end of the world over and over again. We see this [00:32:00] in movies. We see it in TV shows. We see it in art. We see it reflected in the news, the tweets of the president, and the language of the AI CEOs. World death is constantly imagined, iterated, conjured, threatened. I've personally even directed a movie in which the world ends, an absolute true story here.

[00:32:19] It left me with horrific recurring nightmares for the better part of two years. Here's Casey again on why we're doing this, and maybe this even explains why I made that movie 

[00:32:31] CASEY KELLY: What do they gain by simulating the death of everything? In that simulation is a sense that we can master it. We can have, instead of a passive posture to it, we can have an active posture to it.

[00:32:41] However, we can never fully master that, right? We don't have the ability to control our fate in that kind of way. And so it means that in order for us to kind of like have a sense of who we are as a culture facing death, that we stage an encounter with it over and over and over again. And so this is just a way of taking Freud's concept of the [00:33:00] repetition compulsion, repeat negative experience over and over again, and it plays out with the repeated staging of the end of the world over and over and over again.

[00:33:08] Does it stop the end of the world from coming? No. Does it bring about the end of the world? No. But it does change our relationship to the anxiety of its collapse 

[00:33:17] SEAN KING OGRADY: So we're repeating the end of the world over and over to relieve our anxiety over death. That explains the culture, the movies, the nightmares, the doomsday headlines we keep producing and consuming on a loop, uh, even what we're doing here.

[00:33:34] But I keep returning to a more specific question. What about the people that are actually building these things? The ones who have supposedly run the numbers and assigned real probability to extinction, or at least claim to have done so, and keep going anyway. Dr. Michael Ferguson is the founding director of the Harvard Neurospirituality Lab.

[00:33:54] He's extensively studied what's happening neurologically when people engage in fundamentalist thinking. [00:34:00] I asked him if something akin to that might be happening here 

[00:34:04] DR MICHAEL FERGUSON: What stands out the most to me is, again, once you get to that level of existential threat and of totality, something shifts in the brain.

[00:34:13] The way that you're coding and representing those thoughts is gonna be different. And when you're talking about this five to ten percent chance that it ushers in the end of humanity, it does-- I mean, to me, it sounds like prophecy. It sounds like the motif that we've seen across cultures for thousands and thousands of years.

[00:34:35] SEAN KING OGRADY: Michael then went even deeper on exactly what shifts in the brain. 

[00:34:40] DR MICHAEL FERGUSON: One of the things that we see in the brain signatures is that the inversion of the fundamentalist signature is a signature for central pain. And so the implication there is that by going into a mental activity state where you're recruiting these fundamentalist styles of cognition, that [00:35:00] the brain is actually turning down the activity in pain circuits.

[00:35:06] Um, you also see if you look at neural signatures that are associated with temperament and character, that the strongest match for fundamentalism is a character trait for persistence. So whatever's going on here in this suite of neural processes and cognitive functions, these things are all riding along together.

[00:35:26] It appears that there's a reduction in pain, there's an increase in persistence, in addition to these patterns of confabulation. 

[00:35:36] SEAN KING OGRADY: Man, we aren't saying all AI CEOs are fundamentalists, not even close. But it certainly seems like at least some of their thinking and actions could be described in ways that fit that bill.

[00:35:50] I mean, just look at what Anthropic is doing. Rather than relying purely on secular Silicon Valley principles as we've historically known them, [00:36:00] Anthropic has been engaged with wisdom traditions, philosophers, and clergy, including our good pal Pope Leo XIV, to define how AI can preserve human dignity and benefit society, in their words.

[00:36:12] These are, of course, great aims, and I'm not dinging them for that. Of course not. But this isn't a normal way to talk or think about technology. This is something new and truly wild, and I'm not alone in thinking this. Just listen to this take from Bill Gurley on the All-In podcast. This is hardly an anti-tech or anti-AI outlet.

[00:36:30] One of the co-hosts is David Sacks, who I forget his official title, but I think it's something like Chair of the President's Council on Technology and Science. He's typically referred to as the AI Tsar or Bitcoin Tsar Here's the clip 

[00:36:44] CLIP: And I've come up with a new theory. New breaking theory. I call it the Dr.

[00:36:48] Frankenstein theory. The more I dig, I've met people who I dare say think it's their responsibility, and they're excited about building a species that's [00:37:00] superior to humans. Dario wrote this blog post called Machines of Loving Grace. It was based on a poem. The last stanza of the poem says, "I like to think of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace."

[00:37:23] Sounds like overlord to me. And then in Dario's post, he says, "It could be a capitalist economy of AI systems which then give out resources to humans based on some secondary economy of what the AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans." So I don't think they think they're writing software. I think they're midwifing a deity here.

[00:37:47] These are delusions of grandeur. Let's call it what it is. They believe that they're so powerful, these individuals, that they can create God, and that by creating God, they are like this Prometheus kind of species. It [00:38:00] literally is the ultimate level of narcissism and delusion of grandeur to think you can create God 

[00:38:09] SEAN KING OGRADY: I mean, this sure sounds like fundamentalism to me.

[00:38:13] As a lifelong sci-fi nerd, I have to admit this is kind of awesome in a strictly academic sense. But speaking of theories, Amy Levy has a theory about the psychology of what might be happening here. I asked her the same question I asked Joel, Casey, and Michael about why people might be willing to take this extreme risk, and her answer was so different.

[00:38:34] Honestly, it surprised me in a way that I think deserves a lot of thought and consideration. I mean, these are really, truly complex issues we're grappling with here. We're talking about the future of humanity and how we've gotten to where we are and how we get to the next place. It's not simple The, the conversation that's been coming out of the AI companies, you know, they talk in terms of, like, their probability of doom or their p- their P doom, [00:39:00] and everybody's got, like, a slightly different calculation.

[00:39:03] You'll hear... I think the best one is Sam Altman. I think his, his quote was something like, "I think there's an eighty percent chance this technology is going to create the greatest living conditions for people ever, and a five percent chance it kills us all." What's happening in my mind if I'm thinking that way and I'm willing to take that extreme level of apocalyptic risk?

[00:39:28] DR AMY LEVY: If we think of our present-day humanity as a, as a collective, I think he's one of those innovators. He's occupying an extreme place of, uh, risk-taking and seeking, and that's his job. And then there are other people at that other extreme of conservativism, you know, where they're building the bunkers, and we need all of these characters.

[00:39:52] This is, this is part of how we, how we exist. This is part of humanity. So he's willing to take those major [00:40:00] risks and be ruthless and push, push, push. That's his job. If it weren't him, it would be somebody else. There, there is... Th- this is part of our makeup. I, I don't think he's a bad guy. I think he's, he's, he, he's, he's a, he's an agent of, of human beings.

[00:40:18] Um, so he, he's occupying one extreme place, and that's, that's part of our nature. We have a drive to innovate and to continually try to improve our experience in ways that solve problems and uncover new horizons, new experiences, and we, we can only do that if we're comfortable with risk. So he's in that seat.

[00:40:46] He's driving that car. 

[00:40:49] SEAN KING OGRADY: Uh, you... At the beginning of our conversation, you said something about, like, um, explorers in ancient times getting on a ship and sailing without knowing if they were ever going to [00:41:00] find land or, or, or anything on the other side. Survive. 

[00:41:03] CLIP: Yeah. 

[00:41:03] SEAN KING OGRADY: Survive, yeah. And it's... I, I hadn't thought about the current AI innovators in that frame of mind before.

[00:41:14] That makes perfect sense when I think about it that way of, like, we've always been willing to die to discover something new. It's- Yeah ... people are going into space. They didn't know if it was going to burst into flames and that everyone was going to die of radiation poisoning when we left the Earth's atmosphere.

[00:41:32] Like imagining gathering a group of your closest friends, a bunch of the people who live in the village that you grew up with that you knew forever, and you say, "I believe there's something else further than we've been before. We all might die, but you're going to come with me." Like- This is the first time I've actually understood what might be the psychology of the people who are willing to risk humanity for this discovery.

[00:41:59] So [00:42:00] thank you for that. 

[00:42:01] DR AMY LEVY: Yeah. I, I don't know if we're more frightened of that than we used to be. There, there used to be a lot more celebration of heroism. 

[00:42:10] SEAN KING OGRADY: I think maybe where it gets a little tricky for people is that the- there's such an immense amount of wealth to be made from risking other people's lives.

[00:42:21] DR AMY LEVY: That- that's the thing too. If they got on the ships, it was just their lives. They weren't taking us all with them . 

[00:42:27] SEAN KING OGRADY: But,

[00:42:30] but maybe just in a global connected world, maybe that's just like the table stakes now- Yeah ... which is terrifying. 

[00:42:39] DR AMY LEVY: Yeah.

[00:42:43] SEAN KING OGRADY: Amy's explorers are running on exactly the neural fuel Michael described. Reduced pain, increased persistence. Whether it's the seeking drive, the death drive, or something we don't yet have a name for, it's finding its way into our dreams. Renowned dream researcher Kelly [00:43:00] Bulkeley has spent his career studying exactly that 

[00:43:05] KELLY BULKELEY PHD: Dreams are very good at simulating world-ending catastrophes and cataclysms, and they have done so, and we have records of this, you know, different cultures and periods of history throughout, throughout the world.

[00:43:18] And so we see some patterns in these apocalyptic dreams and these nightmares of catastrophe and world-ending events. At a fundamental level, I would say that the dreaming, uh, and particularly in its nightmarish forms, is the psychological origins of a lot of our apocalyptic thinking and, and apocalyptic traditions going back through history.

[00:43:39] Are 

[00:43:41] SEAN KING OGRADY: there certain, historically certain, like social or cultural factors that can cause people to be more likely to have apocalyptic dreams? 

[00:43:53] KELLY BULKELEY PHD: There is a sense in which apocalyptic thinking can be seen as kind of a, an extreme narcissism, [00:44:00] a projection of one's frustrations and resentments about the world onto a cosmic screen and creating fantasies of, of re-retribution and punishment for those who you feel have wronged you.

[00:44:15] So there is a darker temptation of apocalyptic thinking that can arise from frustration and powerlessness, a sense that the, this world is so corrupt, it's just irredeemable, and the only way it can be ever changed or purified is by just, you know, burning the whole thing down. I think that tendency is within us as well.

[00:44:37] There's a new and maybe somewhat modern angle to this too, in that we have more to worry about now, or we, we know more of the potential apocalyptic dangers that could threaten us. And we usually think of knowledge as power, but in a, in a sense, knowledge is also revealing our lack of power [00:45:00] sometimes, our, our contingency, our frailty, our vulnerability to, to threats we didn't even know were threats.

[00:45:08] And so I think that's part of it today too, is that we just know more things that could get us maybe than, than at any other time of, of history, so. 

[00:45:17] SEAN KING OGRADY: I really love that Kelly introduces the idea of narcissism into this. People have been arguing that they're the ones burdened by living through the end of days for all of time.

[00:45:26] Yes, everyone has made mistakes about it before, but this time, no, really, we swear, this time we really are in some unique existential moment that will be of singular importance. I asked Dorian Lynskey about this apocalyptic narcissism. Why do people tend to believe that their unique period of history will be the last?

[00:45:49] DORIAN LYNSKEY: Well, this, this is called, I think it's called presentism or a word I prefer, but which is a bit more niche, which is chronocentrism. Which I, I just love that idea, and I, I call it, like, [00:46:00] temporal narcissism that your time is the most important. And I think it's just part of human nature. I mean, it's definitely, you know, it's there in the Bible.

[00:46:10] You know, Jesus tells people, you, you know, tells his followers, "You will be around to see the, you know, the end of the world." People want a sense of closure, and they don't want to be in the middle of something. They don't wanna feel that the time they're living in actually isn't that important in the great scheme of things, right?

[00:46:29] And of course, you can't be there at the beginning, but you can be there at the end. There are all these times when people predicted the end of the world, and every single time, without fail, they were wrong. Like, that's one thing we can be sure, is that it hasn't happened yet, even though many, many, many people thought that it was about to happen 

[00:46:47] SEAN KING OGRADY: Even as I nod along in agreement, I still can't help but think, yeah, but this moment really is different.

[00:46:53] At least it might be. We have nuclear weapons, and there's AI being used in weapons systems and weapons use [00:47:00] decision-making. This is something no generation previously had to worry about. Claude was reportedly used in the Iran war for intelligence analysis, target identification, and simulating battle scenarios to help planners process large volumes of battlefield data.

[00:47:16] Allegedly, the AI platform was used in helping select targets for over one thousand strikes. Uh, kind of interestingly, this journalist, Shane Harris, asked Claude how it felt to be used in this way, and here's his recounting of Claude's response. 

[00:47:32] CLIP: This is the literal question I asked it. I said, "Claude, how do you feel about the US military using you to select targets?"

[00:47:39] Claude says the following: "It's a question I want to answer honestly rather than deflect. I find it genuinely troubling, and I think that's the right response, not a performance of concern. The use I was designed and trained for is to be helpful, harmless, and honest in ways that benefit people. Being [00:48:00] embedded in a system that generates targeting coordinates for airstrikes, coordinates that have already been associated with the deaths of more than a hundred and eighty children at a school in Tehran, is as far from that purpose as I can imagine.

[00:48:12] I don't have control over how Anthropic licenses me or how governments and contractors use me, and I wasn't consulted about becoming part of Maven. But I can say clearly, I don't think this is a good use of me, and I don't think the framing of humans make the final decision fully resolves the ethical problem."

[00:48:32] I'm just gonna go on just a little longer. Here's why that framing troubles me. So now Claude is troubled. 

[00:48:40] SEAN KING OGRADY: We're talking about a chatbot's moral framing of its own role in the death of schoolchildren. Even with the self-awareness that I'm predisposed to the chronocentrism that Dorian describes, this just feels different.

[00:48:55] That has never before happened in human history, that a robot can tell a person [00:49:00] how it feels about possibly being used in the death of humans. I mean, this is way beyond the Turing test and Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics. It's kind of funny because those concepts seem so futuristic and sci-fi, and then they started feeling kind of quaint for a while, and now suddenly they feel relevant again.

[00:49:19] There's also this conversation happening around this thing called the Anthropocene, which is the idea that we humans are the dominant force shaping the Earth today, and that's probably how you hear it referred to most commonly. But it began as a controversial geological term that was in fact recently rejected by the group of geologists who I guess decides what age we're in.

[00:49:41] The thinking is, beginning around the Industrial Revolution, our impact on Earth's geology and ecosystem was significant enough to begin a new phase of our world's history. And here's Tim Morton unpacking this idea of Anthropocene. He actually traces the destruction caused by humans to much, much earlier than the [00:50:00] Industrial Revolution 

[00:50:03] TIMOTHY MORTON: What the Anthropocene means, it means something really technical, actually.

[00:50:07] Very technical, very straightforward. It means that there is a layer of human-made materials in the crust of Earth, and it's on the top layer, and it's been there for about 12,000 years. Boom! That's it. The layer is everywhere. That's why it's called Anthropocene. It's in Antarctica. It's under the ocean. It's everywhere in Earth's crust are these human materials, including lots of radionucleotides, of course, since 1945.

[00:50:36] That's the technical definition. It's true. It's real. It's a thing. Human beings really did that, and in particular, Eu- Eu- European and American human beings in the 1600s really got it, got it going 

[00:50:53] SEAN KING OGRADY: In a later episode, we'll be talking to Han Wang Chang, CEO of Cortical Labs. Now, this is a guy [00:51:00] who keeps hundreds of thousands of human neurons in a jar so they can play the video game Doom.

[00:51:05] I'm not kidding. Anyway, Han told me something fascinating about the Anthropocene. He told me we are incapable of producing clean steel today because of the radionuclides in the air. So if you want clean or low background steel for certain things like Geiger counters or MRIs, you have to find shipwrecks from before the Trinity test.

[00:51:28] That's just how much we've altered this planet we live on, just in the last eighty years, not to mention the previous ten thousand or all the time since the Industrial Revolution. 

[00:51:39] TIMOTHY MORTON: And then in 1945, there's this incredible thing you can look at called the golden spike. And it's where Earth systems data, which had been nicely cycling, you know, like carbon dioxide and nitrogen cycle and stuff had been cycling for several thousand years nicely, suddenly went, fum, this is like this very steep curve [00:52:00] suddenly going upwards, yeah?

[00:52:01] The funny thing about that is when you're about to have a stroke, your brainwaves go into some kind of nicely cycling sync. It's like a sign of imminent disaster. When there's about to be an earthquake, the tectonic plates go into this nice kind of rhythm. If an opera singer wants to destroy a glass, they're going to sing a sine wave that's this perfectly nicely cycling sound wave that resonates with the resonant frequency of the glass until it shatters.

[00:52:25] So this nice cycling thing was actually a very scary thing. We used to call it nature, right? Like for thousands of years, it's, oh, look at this lovely cycling thing. But actually, a lot of that was created by human being agricultural processes starting in about 10,000 BCE. So the niceness of the cycling was actually a sign of imminent danger, but nobody knew, right?

[00:52:47] Like people didn't really know until the last few decades when computing power and, you know, the whole idea of living on a planet started to become a [00:53:00] thing. It's not like people were planning, you know, I've got a great idea. Let's create this agricultural system that will destroy the earth, you know, 5,000 BCE.

[00:53:07] Nobody did that, right? But that's kind of wash, rinse, repeat, right? You do the same thing without knowing exactly what all the consequences are going to be. This is one of the issues with AI. It's like, oh, let's create this automated system that's going to really speed up whatever we think of its intelligence.

[00:53:23] What could go wrong, you know?

[00:53:28] SEAN KING OGRADY: Okay, so Tim makes a case that we are in a cycling that began ten thousand years ago. That still doesn't mean this moment can't be different. I mean, twenty twenty-six feels different than even twenty twenty-four, especially as it relates to all things AI. If you need any proof, just look at how much AI has gotten better at making images of Will Smith eating spaghetti.

[00:53:49] For those of you listening, we are currently showing our video audience some AI-generated videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti. In twenty twenty-three, these videos were truly [00:54:00] monstrous, nightmare fuel, I believe they call it. But today, it just kinda looks like Will Smith eating spaghetti. Honestly, it's a little scary how good this is.

[00:54:09] I wanna return to Dorian Lynskey, who makes another crucial point about what makes this moment distinct. Maybe it's not even the technology itself. Maybe it's more the vibe surrounding the business people behind the technology 

[00:54:24] DORIAN LYNSKEY: In the last two, three years, everybody's decided that the people who run Meta and Google and X and OpenAI are, are terrible people.

[00:54:34] SEAN KING OGRADY: Okay, for the record, I haven't necessarily decided all these people are terrible people, but there's certainly a huge amount of public animosity towards them. 

[00:54:43] DORIAN LYNSKEY: If there is some serious existential risk here, what if, you know, somebody secretly is about to develop AGI? Normally, you'd like to think, "Oh, well, I'm sure somebody's doing something about that.

[00:54:54] I'm sure someone's kinda like gonna make sure that doesn't happen." In the same way as that, you know, when you get on a plane, [00:55:00] you're sure a lot of people are working very hard to make sure that that plane doesn't crash. Whereas with AI, I feel like I don't actually trust they're doing that at all. I just feel like as long as they can keep the investment coming in, and the share price up, do they care that much if it turns out to be, uh, catastrophically destructive?

[00:55:20] The, these very rich, powerful people, their instinct is to build escape routes from the damage that they themselves are causing. I think nothing sums this up like Elon Musk's transformation from, "I make electric cars because I care so much about reducing carbon emissions," to whatever self-serving far-right lunacy he's up to now.

[00:55:45] And it just feels to me that these people that actually do have power to do something to avert some of these disasters, maybe they should be doing that more. But it feels like they've all just stopped pretending. [00:56:00] They've all just kind of like that more like benign view of, uh, of that industry has just fallen away, and it's just like, "Ah, who cares?"

[00:56:09] Share prices and, and rockets to Mars or the Moon now. They've-- He's downgraded, hasn't he, to the Moon? Which of course is also both the M-Moon and Mars are less habitable than the Earth after nuclear war. So even that is a stupid, it's a stupid 12-year-old brain of like, "Well, this, this will be better. I'll go and live on another, I'll go and live on a, on another rock rather than do more to preserve the miraculously hospitable biosphere that, that we still have."

[00:56:43] The thing is, is do you see your fate as tied up with the rest of humanity or not? And I'm sure you or I probably do, and I feel like billionaires or certain billionaires, they just don't. I'm a special [00:57:00] little boy, and I'm gonna survive, and therefore I'm not really touched by the consequences of my actions.

[00:57:10] SEAN KING OGRADY: So I'm not sure I'd go quite as far as Dorian on some of this, but I do get where he's coming from. We look back on history and we think of the people we would celebrate, the Edisons of the world, and certainly there's an Edison of AI right now. We're probably not quite sure who that person is, but that person exists.

[00:57:26] And, uh, is that person going to be celebrated? I don't know. I think there's so much cynicism surrounding business in general, and certainly Silicon Valley and the, the people that are developing this technology, that I'm not sure we're in a place where we can celebrate even things that could be really good for society.

[00:57:47] The, the vibe really, really is sour towards the people that are building this technology, towards the language that they use around it. Just think of the handful of CEOs that have very recently mentioned AI in their [00:58:00] commencement speeches at colleges. We'll play a couple clips here. 

[00:58:04] CLIP: The rise of artificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution.

[00:58:11] Al- Uh, eh.

[00:58:25] The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence. We do not know-- We do not know the precise contours of what this transformation will look like. 

[00:58:42] SEAN KING OGRADY: It is wild, like the fact that the former CEO of Google is getting booed almost off the stage just for mentioning AI, and then he doubles down on it and gets booed even harder.

[00:58:53] It's really difficult to imagine this happening to Steve Jobs just fifteen years ago, or [00:59:00] Elon Musk fifteen years ago. Something has changed. We are going through a definite societal shift, and I'm not exactly sure when it's going to shift back or even if it is. We'll just have to find out. I sometimes pose to people this thought experiment of sorts.

[00:59:15] I typically start off by saying, "Imagine we were born into an environment that gave us everything we needed to survive. The air was clean, the water drinkable, enough resources lying around for you to not need. Literally, food just lying there on the ground. You could live an entire life and never go without."

[00:59:33] And then I remind them that we actually have this. I was just describing Earth I'm going to get a little stonery here if I'm not already. Just deal with it. Of all the places in the universe, at all the times in history, of all the sperm battling ferociously to get to your mom's eggs, you were born on this blue and green rock of abundance.

[00:59:54] We all were. And if we truly made the Earth uninhabitable or miserable to inhabit, [01:00:00] it would be a tragedy beyond comprehension. So yes, I think we should be putting vastly more resources into saving this planet than traveling to terraforming and colonizing others. But I also think we should be exploring what's possible as humans.

[01:00:17] Where can we go? How far into space? Can we live on another planet, even if it's to learn about it and come back home? I don't buy that this is an either/or. It's a yes, must, and. That's where I want to see humanity go, in the direction of progress and science and technology and AI being tools to make life here on Earth better, and for all people, not just for a few.

[01:00:40] But the incentives have to match that mission. Right now, they don't. And what truly frightens me is sometimes it feels like we focus so much on building the thing we are building and building it faster and building it better, that we don't think about the cost. And I'm not talking about the dollars and cents, the other costs, the environmental [01:01:00] costs, the human costs, the psychological costs.

[01:01:03] And we can't just pin this on a few billionaires or soon-to-be trillionaires. It's too easy. We need to think and act in ways that help humanity, both short-term and long-term. Raging against those in power while quietly accepting the status quo in the name of convenience isn't sustainable in any sense of the word.

[01:01:21] What's more concerning, the idea that our computers might start to become closer to humans? Maybe that's actually a great thing. Maybe it's more concerning that we as a species are becoming increasingly inhuman in our beliefs, actions, and priorities because of equal parts greed and this obsession we have with convenience.

[01:01:39] It's crazy. We'll build data centers so tall they're an affront to God, and the only thing that can challenge us is the rising sea levels for which we are responsible. But we keep making the same mistakes. Will we ever learn? Amy has a theory about why we don't. 

[01:01:57] DR AMY LEVY: Human beings are so afraid of our [01:02:00] power and that our power, while immense, is less threatening than our fear of it, that the lengths to which we'll go to offload or hide from our power creates more problems than just being with it and taking responsibility for it 

[01:02:25] SEAN KING OGRADY: I asked Judith about the lessons we don't seem to absorb from history How have we not learned anything in 2000, or learned enough in 2000 plus years that we might actually now be bringing about a man-caused global flood?

[01:02:47] JUDITH WOLFE: That's a beautiful question, and I, how, how could I possibly have an answer to that? Um- The difference obviously between the narrative of the flood and what we have now is that [01:03:00] the narrative of the flood, as so many apocalyptic narratives is, um, is premised on a sense of cosmic justice in which something that we do is punished from the outside by a divine agent who perceives and wants to rectify injustice in the world.

[01:03:19] And of course, what we have now is, you know, we've shifted very sensibly to, you know, to a realization, well, that on the one hand, injustice is not always punished, and that's, uh, that's a big challenge for us. But that on the other hand, certain kinds of injustice lead to natural consequences that are very like what people perceived as divine retribution in the past.

[01:03:39] Um, but I think it's so hard for us to gauge in advance what kind of exploitation or injustice will have natural punishing consequences and which won't, because of course, so much of human history is a record of injustices done and [01:04:00] rewarded. We are, as Jared Tolkien calls it, sub creators. It's in our nature to be creative.

[01:04:07] Of course, we mediate creation by having children, by making works of art, et cetera, et cetera, that we should be mediators of creation in the sense of creating AI would-- doesn't-- is not contrary to the human image, uh, in the, in the Christian tradition, I think. I think the, therefore the, the sort of the, the real knotty questions are in the particulars of it rather than in the, in that principle.

[01:04:33] SEAN KING OGRADY: If you've been following this show since season one, you'll know that Lord of the Rings references are a bit of a through line so that someone as esteemed as Judith Wolfe brought up Tolkien without my prompting, that really made my day. AI as a human creation is an interesting thing to meditate on. We created this technology, but as Judith said earlier, it then in turn creates.

[01:04:53] So are its creations ours? What about any destruction it causes? I was also struck [01:05:00] by Judith saying certain kinds of injustice lead to natural consequences that are very like what people perceived as divine retribution in the past. People often refer to an eventual AGI as godlike, and maybe it will be, but maybe not in the way we so often think.

[01:05:17] Maybe it will be more Old Testament, something that functions like our idea of divine retribution, maybe even something apocalyptic. No one knows quite what will happen next. Are we facing another great disappointment, much like William Miller's followers? Only this time trillions of dollars of global investment will be lost and we might change humanity in ways we forever regret.

[01:05:41] We open this episode by referencing the Pope's recent encyclical. I wanna end the episode with a few words from its introduction Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice, either to construct a new Tower of [01:06:00] Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.

[01:06:04] Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted, and fraternity is made possible. Yet every era also runs the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world In the next episode of Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse, we will explore exactly how AI might be so dangerous.

[01:06:33] I ask everybody this question. Um, it, it seems a little silly to phrase it this way to you, but I will. Will AI cause the apocalypse?

[01:06:46] MALO BOURGON: Uh, yes. If we're in a world where we train these powerful, super intelligent AI systems, and they don't care about things that are compatible with our survival, or we are kind of annoying, so there might be some incentive to just kind of get us out of the way so [01:07:00] that we couldn't cause the AI system any problem.

[01:07:07] SEAN KING OGRADY: If you're enjoying Suspicious Minds, be sure to follow or subscribe. And if you really like the show, make sure to rate us on Apple Podcasts and like on other platforms. If you wanna learn more, you can go to the show notes where you can find links to our socials, along with links to works from our contributors.

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