> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Here We Go Again - URL: https://goodoil.news/here-we-go-again-21/ - Published: 2026-10-28T20:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-28T19:59:59.000Z - Description: Yesterday’s apocalypse. - Author: Guest Post - Tags: Technology, History **JD** Climate change is so yesterday. We knew it was losing traction when Greta switched from whining about her ‘stolen’ childhood and started whining about Gaza instead. But even Gaza is now being supplanted in our apocalyptic consciousness by Artificial Intelligence – the new ‘catastrophe *de jour*’. Climate change continues, some say, and AI’s ultimate capabilities remain uncertain. But as a story about humanity standing on the edge of destruction, AI has advantages that melting glaciers increasingly lack. Climate catastrophe has become familiar. After decades of warnings, conferences, emissions targets and tipping points, it has acquired the furniture of bureaucracy. Its language involves carbon budgets, electricity markets and competing models. Familiarity may not make the problem disappear. It does, however, make it harder to hold an audience. AI offers a more gripping drama. Humanity creates an intelligence, discovers it can improve itself and loses control. The machine penetrates our institutions, commands our infrastructure and pursues objectives, indifferent to human survival. A plot that is immediately recognisable: Frankenstein has acquired an internet connection. We have rehearsed this encounter repeatedly. Around 1900 electricity brought invisible power into the home, provoking fears about shocks, fires and health. Commercial rivalry amplified the anxiety: during the earlier ‘war of the currents’, Edison’s supporters exploited public fear of alternating current. Real hazards and promotional alarm travelled together. The motor car followed, condemned as a menace to pedestrians and established street life. Cinema supposedly corrupted morals and encouraged crime. Radio brought frightening adventures into children’s bedrooms and raised fears about propaganda. Television inherited accusations of passivity, violence and intellectual decay. The household appliance became an instrument of cultural ruin. Not all these were extinction scares. Many just predicted the death of family life, childhood innocence or civilisation as previously understood, but the recurring exaggeration across all of them was to convert particular dangers into sweeping predictions of inevitable total degeneration. A chronological inventory reveals how regularly the threatening instrument changed. Čapek’s 1920 play *R.U.R.* imagined artificial workers destroying humanity. Nuclear weapons subsequently gave global destruction a material foundation. The 1970s brought fears of laboratory plagues from recombinant DNA. Later came genetic engineering, cloning and ‘Frankenfoods’, alongside predictions that automation would abolish employment. The Millennium Bug gave us simultaneous computer failure and societal collapse. In 2008, the Large Hadron Collider supplied black holes swallowing Earth. Mobile phones and wireless networks pandered to radiation anxieties. And today, artificial intelligence gathers several older fears into one remarkably adaptable package. Why then does the apocalyptic version attract us? One explanation begins with survival. Missing a real danger can cost more than reacting to an imaginary one. Our attention consequently gives threatening information considerable weight. But that useful tendency becomes unreliable when an unfamiliar possibility is vivid, repeated and difficult to assess. Doomsday also simplifies. The future normally contains conflicting trends, uncertain outcomes and tedious compromises. Apocalypse supplies a cause, a villain, a deadline and an ending. Even a frightening explanation can feel more manageable than bewilderment. We exchange the discomfort of uncertainty for the apparent clarity of knowing what will destroy us. Religious traditions applied this structure long before laboratories existed. Christianity and Islam envisage resurrection and judgment; Zoroastrianism anticipates evil’s defeat and creation’s renovation. Jewish traditions include messianic renewal and Hindu cosmologies describe cycles of decline, dissolution and recreation, while Buddhist traditions envisage the disappearance and eventual renewal. Secular catastrophes follow a similar pattern. Humanity becomes arrogant, ignores its prophets, violates a boundary and faces consequences. Salvation requires repentance, restraint or transformation. Plus there is another huge attraction: the privilege of being present at history’s decisive junction. Most generations inherit an unfinished world and leave it unfinished. Believing that ours will determine humanity’s survival gives lives lived on Facebook, X and Tik Tok, ordinary lives, extraordinary significance. We become the witnesses, the warned, the potential rescuers. The future of everything appears to depend upon us. Every generation experiences its own inventions as unprecedented because, within its experience, they are. The leap from ‘this is new’ to ‘this is the final turning point’ is a seductive doctrine. AI intensifies the appeal because the warning is beginning to come from its creators. Their concern deserves attention but their prominence creates incentives too. Describing a product as potentially world ending magnifies its importance. Sincere anxiety, commercial prestige and demands for regulation can coexist without any simple explanation covering every participant. Meanwhile, news organisations, campaigners and online platforms compete for the same scarce attention. A measured account of factual news struggles against the frisson of dread and excitement caused by warnings of annihilation. Repetition can make the most dramatic possibility feel like the most likely eventual outcome. So it was with all of the existential threats discussed above, they all commanded our attention, sometimes, it seemed, to the exclusion of almost all else. But then the next big thing came along and what seemed critically, life-threateningly important, gradually became yesterday’s news. There will always be existential threats, indeed, sometime in the future the earth will cease to exist, but that’s too far away to be of interest. The pleasure of believing we inhabit the decisive moment, right now, is a much more seductive idea. Anyone spotted Greta at a ‘Ban the AI Centre’ march yet?