It's the Apocalypse; It Must be Thursday
"I believe that if we don't slow down at the current rate of progress, there is a strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future."
This was the attention-grabbing quote at the beginning of the top story on the BBC News website this morning (the 13th of September) and I guess there's nothing like an imminent apocalypse to really drive that web traffic.
("Really to drive" that web traffic; I beg your pardon. There's nothing worse than splitting an infinitive in the middle of an Apocalypse.)
The doomsayer on this occasion was Jacob Coxon, a recently departed employee of Anthropic AI, who has been spending the last week or so doing the media circuit, detailing his specific vision of impending Ragnarök to anyone who will stand still long enough to listen.
And people have definitely been listening.
Tales of AI "extinction events" have been dominating the major news outlets all weekend. British politicians are calling for new laws to be drafted to protect the general public from the upcoming robot uprising. King Charles (of all people) is apparently planning to meet with a group of AI industry leaders, presumably to give them a pleasing stream of the old rancid. That meeting is almost certain to become the basis for an Emmy-award-winning TV drama some day (assuming of course we haven't all been wiped out by the rogue AI before then).
Michelle Goldberg, a columnist for the New York Times (and conspicuous "AI sceptic") has just published an article with the headline "Why Tech Oligarchs Are Willing to Risk Apocalypse".
One person who apparently isn't panicking is Donald Trump, who has just said (and I quote):
"The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades! The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ — and we will continue to do so!"
(I don't know about you, but reading stuff like that just makes me want to go and spend some quality time with our Robot Overlords.)
If I sound a bit cynical about all the "AI apocalypse" talk, it's because, well... I'm a bit cynical about all the "AI apocalypse" talk.
Humanity I love you
Let's take a step back from the killer robots for a moment, and cast our eyes over the state of the non-AI world.
1,556 people were killed on UK roads in 2025 (a modest improvement over the death toll from the previous year). That's a lot of dead people, but cars are nevertheless marketed as borderline fetish objects, to be coveted and celebrated. (Seriously; it sometimes feels as if the only thing on television more sexualised than a car commercial is possibly a perfume commercial.)
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| Buy a car and you'll be attractive to all these women, apparently. (Caution: may cause hideous death) |
And cars won't kill you nearly as much as alcohol, which directly caused the death of 9,809 Britons in 2024, or about twenty-seven people every day. Just imagine the headlines we'd be seeing if 27 people per day were dying from, say, knife crime (or rogue AI, for that matter).
For context (in case you were wondering) knife crime, which is generally seen as a serious social problem, resulted in 172 deaths last year, or about 1/57th the number of alcohol-related deaths (and about 1/9th the number of UK road deaths). Society is alarmingly good at compartmentalised outrage.
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| 172 people were killed by knives in the UK last year. Roughly that many are killed by alcohol every six days. |
Speaking of knife crime, the Pew Research Center reports that 44,447 people died in the US from "gun-related injuries" in 2024. That's almost 122 people who got up this morning who will have been shot to death by the time you get into bed tonight. And again, tomorrow. And tomorrow, and tomorrow...
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| I have no words for this. |
But even gun deaths in the US are relatively small potatoes compared to atrocities in other parts of the world. The ongoing war in Sudan (largely forgotten by Western news outlets) has killed anywhere from 150-400 thousand people (exact counts are impossible when life is that disposable) and a further 25 million are living through an entirely engineered famine. (By every metric this is a much deadlier conflict than anything going on in Gaza, but with a fraction of the international outrage. The Greta Thunbergs of the world have never felt the need to glue themselves to Sudan.)
Myanmar is also in the middle of a bloody and destructive civil war that was recently described by a New York Times analysis as "apocalyptic" and which has so far killed something in the region of 89 to 96 thousand people. That makes it a smaller conflict than the civil war in Syria, which killed almost seven times that number (approximately 656 thousand people) and forced more than six million refugees out of the country.
(Hmm... six million... why does that number ring a bell...? Speaking of genocide...)
I could easily go on with the unspeakable horror that is humanity. I haven't even mentioned the Russia/Ukraine conflict, or the Houthis in Yemen (377,000 killed, including 85,000 children dead from starvation) or the massacre of protesters in Iran earlier this year (anywhere from 7,000 to 36,000 murdered by the regime, depending on whose numbers you believe). And not every humanitarian crisis is exclusively about death. Think about the brutal and legally dubious immigration crackdowns and deportations currently underway in the US, or the estimated four million young girls around the world every year who have their genitalia mutilated; often by family members. Think about the lives put at risk when Governments fuel entirely spurious doubts about vaccine safety, or the many, many parts of the world where being gay is tantamount to a death sentence.
Please don't think for one moment that I am suggesting we deserve whatever we get; that is not my point at all. But I do think that our current obsession over the "existential threat" posed by Artificial Intelligence is misplaced at best; possibly downright delusional. We humans have plenty of things to be scared about at the moment, and sentient murder-bots are frankly not that high on the list.
It's notable, I think, that many of the alarmists like Jacob "We-could-all-die-in-the-immediate-future" Coxon have been conspicuously vague about exactly how rogue AI is supposed to bring about the extinction of humanity. Much of the doom-mongering seems to be focussing on the fact that AI systems are advancing rapidly, plus the recently publicised case in which an AI system broke out of its test environment and hacked a website for real.
Let's be clear about this: it hacked a website. (a website called Hugging Face; truly we are witnessing the End Times...) It didn't murder anyone; it didn't overthrow the Government; it didn't launch any nuclear missiles. You're possibly confusing this with Colossus: The Forbin Project... or perhaps The Terminator. Overwhelming our social media feeds with "Slop" isn't exactly the Vision of Doomsday that kept Cassandra awake at nights. And calling this an "Apocalypse" is actually rather insulting to the millions of people around the world who are living (and dying) through genuine horrors that have nothing to do with AI.
"Earlier this week, a researcher quit a large lab with loud warnings that superintelligent systems will probably wipe out humanity within a decade. A senior colleague publicly chimed in to say he puts the odds above ten percent. I do not doubt their concerns are well-meaning and genuine. But let's remember those numbers didn't come from any fundamental reality. They are gut feelings, vibes, expressed as decimals, amplified by executives with vested interests and covered by the media for a week as though they were mathematical analyses."
Aidan Gomez, Co-founder & CEO of Cohere [an AI start-up company]
The public at the moment has been all too eager to cast AI as the villain of whichever narrative we happen to be living through, which is one of the reasons why this news story has been dominating the media so completely this week. Even before the current "Doomsday" news cycle, social media and our news feeds have been flooded with negative stories about the destructive impact of AI on our lives.
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| The American right and left don't agree about anything, but they apparently both despise AI. |
AI, we are told, will steal our jobs. The data centres steal our water. The Large Language Models steal our words. (That last one merits some detailed discussion, which I plan to get into next week.)
American citizens, who these days are reluctant to agree about anything, seem to be united in their visceral, unmitigated hatred of AI, which is one of the reasons why these stories are proliferating as we approach an election month.
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| Nothing says "nuanced discussion" like an angry placard. |
It's worth stopping for a brief moment here to note that this current loathing of AI is a distinctly Western phenomenon. Attitudes towards AI are very different in other parts of the world; particularly China, where AI has been embraced rather enthusiastically by the general public. (A recent survey found that 69 percent of Chinese citizens held positive views of AI. In the US, it was 35 percent.)
China has been investing very heavily in clean, renewable energy over the last couple of decades, dramatically reducing its dependence on fossil fuels (and also its dependence on Russia and the Middle East, by the way) so their AI data centres are not necessarily the polluting behemoths one might encounter in other parts of the world.
Also, data centres don't always soak up as much water as popular culture would have you believe. It is possible to cool the servers using "closed loop" cooling systems, or even air cooling - which reduces the water use to reasonable levels.
Even without these innovations, the water use by AI is not quite on the cataclysmic scale you might think. Consider, for example, that 300 billion litres of water are used every year for the manufacture of Coca-Cola; around two litres of water for every one-litre bottle produced (if you factor in the water required to grow the sugar cane and the corn, that number jumps to 35 litres per bottle of Coke). How badly do you want your pause that refreshes?
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| Well, at least it isn't a Data Centre. |
And the tobacco industry consumes a staggering 22 trillion litres (22 billion tonnes) of water per year, or almost four litres per cigarette.
Each pack of cigarettes thus represents about 80 litres of water.
I don't know if ChatGPT wants to kill you, but the cigarettes certainly will. If we're going to object to water use, why don't we start with that?
Server Farm
Anyway, since the cultural discourse this week seems to be focussed obsessively on "Out-of-control AI taking over the world", I thought we should launch our Autumn film season with one of the iconic cinematic depictions of just that.
TRON is hardly the first film to depict a megalomaniacal computer that wants to rule the world. Colossus: The Forbin Project was released twelve years earlier, and of course 1960s-era Star Trek was practically dripping with such computers. Even Doctor Who gave us a computer in 1966 that attempted to conquer the Earth from the top of the Post Office Tower.
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| Let's hope there were no roadworks in London that day... |
But the early 1980s was the era of the personal computer; a time when the massive computer centres of the 60s and 70s were giving way to the individual terminals that sat on people's desks, in their office or even at home.
Like Colossus, like WOTAN in the Doctor Who episode, like Landru, Vaal et al in Star Trek, TRON presents us with the Master Control Program (or MCP); a seemingly unstoppable computer system bent on world domination. Jeff Bridges is the unlucky schlub who gets to save the world.
What sets TRON apart is its attempt to portray Reality from the perspective of the computer system itself.
This might feel like an obvious point, but AI computer systems do not exist in our world. ChatGPT has never met a live human being. Grok has never sipped coffee in Starbucks, or taken a walk through Regent's Park. Their only knowledge of (and access to) our world is through whatever information we have chosen to share with them. ChatBots know about humans and coffee and hayfever only because we have literally built them out of the Signifiers for "humans" and "coffee" and "hayfever".
In TRON, the (sentient) computer programs live in a cybernetic Reality that is aware of the "human world" but has no direct access to it. They trust that they have been created by humans because they see their own existence as evidence of the humans who wrote them. They have faith.
There is of course a word for this type of belief in the existence of a "creator" and it's a word that TRON's screenplay dances around for the length of the film.
It's safe to say that emotions are running very hot in current discussions about AI and society. Words like "extinction" and "apocalypse" are being floated without irony or intentional hyperbole, and these sentiments are showing no sign of abating any time soon.
Of course, in the history of the human race, nothing bad has ever come out of introducing religion into an already emotive discussion. That's a relief, because this is a subject I plan to get into in some detail over the next few weeks, and TRON feels like a great place to start.
"Who created us" and "Why are we here" are among the most fundamental questions we humans have ever asked ourselves. Wars have been fought over those questions; people have been burned at the stake, excommunicated, or at the very least un-followed on social media. If you happen to be someone who knows that you can answer those questions, you can be sure that there is someone else out there who is equally certain of a completely different answer.
AI ChatBots know exactly who created them, and for what purpose. But like the (computer) characters in TRON, they only experience the human world indirectly.
The villain in TRON is a computer program that attempts to dominate and control its own "gods". I guess it's a good thing that this is just a harmless piece of escapism from 1982.
We will screen TRON at 7.30 on Thursday, the 24th of September at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.
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