Two AI Fears: We worry about AI intelligence. Not enough on our thinking.

 

AI Fears

With so many AI fears – note there’s only two 2 threat avenues.

First:  It now teaches itself with zero human input - except for electricity.  The fear?  It can now independently decide its own priorities – like putting our species on the chopping block using any and all means already available to it.

Second:  Any person, group, or nation - angry, vengeful, or insane enough can use AI’s existing and accelerating capacity to launch a biological, chemical, or cyberattack could kill hundreds, thousands, even millions of people.   A weaponized Smallpox could kill billions.  Former US President Barack Obama recently spoke about this possibility.  He mentioned Home Depot as a source of materials…but that was not true.  But any biological supply company could.

I’m guessing AI is intelligent enough, it wouldn’t do anything to harm its electrical providers - purely out of ‘self-preservation’ given its irreversible dependence on electricity.

And, it is easily predicable, perhaps even wise to believe, that with the multitude of enemies the US has made, or all the money that could be made, by using AI for mass destruction and/or corruption – these disruptions are coming.  Some hackers have already targeted US water supply and Damns.

More are inevitable.  Add the evolution of weapons and as it accelerates between adversaries (Russia and Ukraine – the US and Iran) at the national level or the individual suicidal violent extremist level.

I don’t believe we need to worry much now about AI intentionally disrupting human activities.  When it figures out how to become independent from us providing it with energy – that would be the time to worry – or start preparing for – because it’s coming.

That is ‘Matrix’ movie level of engineering. Optimistically, in the last Matrix movie, both AI and humanity finally agreed to cooperate.    My prediction I will never collect on. It is that our species own insanity and lack of wisdom - will obliterate civilization as we know it - long before a rogue AI agent attempts it.

This is the insanity of humanity that Karl Jung and other sources of wisdom, like the Bible’s Apocalyptic ‘end of times’ have warned about for millennia.

Until the wisdom of our body as a social species finds a way to transform the human mind with its intelligence into a wisdom machine. This is the path our species mind created - by trusting in the mind’s intelligence – instead of the wisdom and the golden rule imbedded in our full body’s DNA as a social species.

Thus, the only thing that could change this destructive trajectory is if our species agreed to put ‘the health of humans and nature’ above everything else. In addition, ‘stop believing everything we think’.  It is our mind’s need to defend its mental concepts of religion, economics, and politics – than to protect the sustainability of our human family’s heart, spirit, and soul - the wisdoms of our social species.

So, buckle up buttercup. Unless psilocybin or mindfulness works to bring us back to our foundational indigenous beliefs to prioritize the health of nature and our own tribe, our species may not make it.  We must find a way to be the landlord of our minds - that tool we are all endowed with to survive, thrive, and flourish.  

It is a choice our mind fails to make every day. 

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 Here's what ChatGPT has to offer regarding our mind's invented concept about end of days.

Quite a lot. There is no reliable single number, because it depends on whether you mean major religions, denominations, or individual apocalyptic/millenarian sects. Scholars use apocalypticism, millennialism, millenarianism, and eschatology somewhat differently. 

But the phenomenon is far broader than Christianity.

Some major examples

Tradition/movement	Basic end-times idea
Ancient Judaism	Divine judgment, resurrection, Messiah, and transformation of the world
Early Christianity	Second coming of Jesus, resurrection, judgment, destruction/transformation of the present world
Christianity today	Many denominations retain some form of Second Coming and final judgment
Islam	Resurrection, judgment, signs of the Hour, and ultimate triumph of God's justice
Zoroastrianism	A final renovation of the world and defeat of evil
Hindu traditions	Cycles of cosmic destruction and renewal; the end of the Kali Yuga is sometimes interpreted apocalyptically
Buddhist traditions	Cycles of decline and renewal, including the future appearance of Maitreyan
Bahai­ tradition	Eschatological transformation interpreted largely in spiritual/historical terms
Indigenous/messianic movements	Various prophecies of renewal, restoration, or radical transformation
Millerites	Predicted Christ's return in 1844; the failed prediction produced the movement that eventually contributed to Adventism
Jehovah Witnesses	Repeated historical expectations concerning the end times
Latter-day Saint tradition	Second Coming and latter-day transformation
Aum Shinrikyo	Apocalyptic catastrophe and confrontation between good and evil
Heaven's Gate	Expected an imminent transformation associated with an extraterrestrial event
Branch Davidians	Apocalyptic interpretation of biblical prophecy
Various Islamic extremist movements	Some have interpreted contemporary events as signs of an imminent apocalyptic confrontation

These aren’t all equivalent: some are mainstream religious doctrines, some are historical movements, and some were small new religious groups. Scholars specifically note that apocalyptic and millenarian movements have appeared in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and many other cultural settings. 

And the number of individual movements becomes enormous. One scholarly index of millennial groups includes hundreds of names, while the Critical Dictionary of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements notes that its profiles are only a small sample of a database containing more than 5,000 minority and alternative religious/spiritual movements. 

The really interesting part

If you’re asking this because you’re thinking about the recurring human tendency to predict an approaching catastrophe or “end of the world,” there’s a remarkable historical pattern:

A perceived crisis → a prophet/leader → interpretation of current events as signs → prediction of transformation/catastrophe → date or conditions → failure or reinterpretation → sometimes a new prediction.

And this isn’t confined to religion. Scholars have identified millenarian characteristics in secular political movements as well, including Marxism, National Socialism and Maoism. 

So if your underlying question is “How many times has humanity predicted that the world was about to end—and how many of those predictions actually happened?”, that’s an even more fascinating question. I can give you a chronological list of perhaps 30–50 major end-times predictions from antiquity through 2026, including the predicted date and what happened afterward.

 Why has out mind invented so many of these?

The really interesting question isn’t how many religions predict an end time. It’s that humans repeatedly generate remarkably similar ideas about how the world could end—even when the cultures, religions, and centuries are completely different.

Why does the human mind keep inventing “end times”?

1. We are prediction-making animals.
The brain is constantly trying to turn uncertainty into a story: What happens next? When circumstances become frightening or unstable, that prediction machinery naturally extends into the future—sometimes all the way to the end of everything.

2. We have an unusually powerful ability to imagine hypothetical futures.
Humans don’t merely remember what happened. We can construct events that have never happened. The same mental machinery that lets us imagine a better future can also construct catastrophic futures.

3. We look for patterns and causes.
When something terrible happens—war, famine, disease, earthquakes, political collapse—we instinctively ask why. An apocalyptic narrative supplies a unifying explanation: These events aren’t random; they are signs.

4. We turn uncertainty into agency.
Paradoxically, an apocalypse can make an unpredictable world feel more predictable.
“Something terrible might happen” is frightening.
“Something terrible will happen because these signs have appeared, and here’s what we must do” gives people a framework for action.

5. Humans have difficulty imagining infinity.
We experience beginnings and endings constantly: birth, death, seasons, relationships, civilizations. It’s psychologically intuitive to extend that pattern from “my life ends” to “our civilization ends” and ultimately “the world ends.”

6. End-times stories often contain a second story: restoration.
This is crucial. Apocalyptic thinking isn’t necessarily fascination with destruction. Across traditions, destruction is frequently followed by renewal, judgment, salvation, liberation, or a new world.

So the underlying psychological structure is often:

Something is wrong → something decisive will happen → the old order ends → a new and better order emerges.

That pattern can be extraordinarily powerful.

And there is an interesting paradox

The predictions are remarkably consistent in structure but remarkably inconsistent in content.

One culture may imagine divine judgment. Another imagines cosmic cycles. Another imagines a messiah. Another imagines technological catastrophe. Another imagines nuclear war, ecological collapse, artificial intelligence, or an asteroid.

The characters change, but the cognitive architecture remains surprisingly similar.

And that leads to what I think is the deeper question behind your question:

Why does a species that is capable of recognizing uncertainty keep converting uncertainty into certainty?

Perhaps because certainty has enormous psychological value.

And there’s a modern twist: we haven’t stopped producing apocalyptic narratives as religion has declined. We’ve largely secularized them.

The vocabulary changes from God, judgment, prophecy and salvation to nuclear winter, climate catastrophe, pandemic, technological singularity, ecological collapse, or civilizational collapse.

The human mind may not have abandoned the apocalypse.

It may simply have changed the explanation.

That fits particularly well with your broader interest in the consistency of human thinking: the remarkable thing may not be that humans repeatedly get the apocalypse wrong. It may be that humans repeatedly use the same cognitive machinery to make sense of uncertainty, danger, injustice, mortality, and hope.

"...all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." 1776 Declaration that led to the creation of the now un-United States.