Overcoming the Growing Wave of Ambient AI Nihilism and Public Fatalism

To imagine the future as being almost entirely bleak has somehow crept into the collective this year.

Last week I was having coffee with an old friend. He was telling me about what his kids wanted to study when they went to university, when he suddenly broke off, stared into the middle distance and said, “I wish I never had children.”

He’d been a father for 20 years and I’d never heard him say that.

“Oh my god, why?”

He loves his kids beyond measure, but right at that moment, he looked desolate.

“AI,” he replied.

“What about it?”

It could have been anything AI-related at this point in time. Was it that AI was going to take all the jobs his kids would have done, rendering their lives impoverished and without purpose or meaning? Or was it environmental, with all the water and energy AI consumes that is going to create further stress on the climate and make the planet uninhabitable? Or was it the news that week that AI could “kill all humans” within the next 10 years?

It was the latter. We talked listlessly about the killing all humans thing for a bit, then moved on. But the shadow had fallen and I started wondering: is the polycrisis that we are facing so overwhelming that we don’t even have the capacity to talk about it with urgency any more? Instead it’s just there, in the air, ambient, like pollution, each particle containing its own particular doomsday scenario – and the only way to be in this atmosphere, is to be numb to it.

Currently, for so many, all our past and future decisions are being refracted through this strange and dark moment.

If you’re middle-aged – it looks like my friend, wishing (for a moment) you’d never brought kids into the world. Or it might be wondering if it’s worth continuing to work, if you’re not going to be able to enjoy a normal retirement.

If you’re young – it looks like being unable to pick a university degree or vocation because you don’t know what professions or trades will be obsolete in a few years. Or wondering if it’s worth sacrificing and saving for an enormous house deposit, if you won’t have a proper job or future to service a 30-year mortgage.

And if you’re older – it’s being grateful that you won’t be around to see it all unravel.

There are several answers, or ways out of this nihilism we now face – and none of them will be provided by tech.

The first is to wake up. Usually if someone was actually trying to kill you - if they broke into your house and tried to murder you, you would fight back.

Yet we greet the news that AI could cause human extinction with a glazed indifference.

It’s worth remembering that no one actually asked for AI, and yet here it suddenly is trying to kill us. And even if that’s averted, it’s embedding itself in our workplaces and in our emotional lives (GPT may be the largest provider of mental health services in the US), robbing us of the capacity for critical thinking, and threatening economic and social stability.

Why are we so numb in the face of what is – currently – a preventable threat?

This numbness could be the result of almost 20 years of smartphones and social media where, addicted to entertainment, our attention spans have been shortened, and through our individualised algorithms, our capacity for organisation and collective action have been diminished.

Or it could be the huge political power tech companies have that means all of us - including governments feel powerless, or have been captured by big tech.

It could be that the tide of this thing – this progress, the Last Invention – feels inevitable, and like the Luddites storming the factories, any resistance is ultimately useless.

The next solution, after we wake up, is to return to first principles. What are the ingredients for human flourishing? Once we can articulate that, it’s like a rope that can guide us back to where we should be.

Human flourishing is not having a machine to do your critical thinking for you – rather, it’s to engage in the pleasure and the pain of working things out for yourself.

Flourishing is human-to-human relationships where we care for and nurture each other. It’s not talking to a LLM for 18 hours a day about our personal problems.

Flourishing is having a direct relationship with the natural world – not the world through a screen, or the natural world itself destroyed and degraded to create more capacity for screen-based existence.

These are all things worth fighting for. There is a place for technology in our world, it’s just that when we start hearing that it could destroy our world that we should wake up, shake off that numb feeling and start fighting back.