Yet Another “Extinction Event” That Isn’t

In my new book – The American Dream: Why It’s Still Alive… and How to Achieve It – I detail the many ways that academia, Hollywood, the corporate media, and social media try to depict the world as a dumpster fire.

Yet, despite our many problems and challenges, most long-term trends are positive.

People are living longer than ever. Standards of living have never been higher. Academic attainment has never been greater. (There are more Americans with high school diplomas, college degrees, and post-graduate degrees than ever before.) Violence – despite what you see on the evening news – is in a long-term cycle of decline. Air and water quality have been improving for decades. Median household income and net worth are at record levels.

In short, Americans are living longer, healthier, safer, richer, freer lives than ever before.

It galls the naysayers, but human progress is an historical fact and an empirical reality.

Yet the Enemies of the Dream have a secret weapon. They know that we are hard-wired to be on the lookout for all manner of risks and threats.

In a highly uncertain world, the best strategy is to over-worry.

And so they play us like a fine Stradivarius, while insisting that they are only trying to help us.

Take Al Gore, for example.

When his book and documentary An Inconvenient Truth came out 20 years ago, he promised that he was trying to save us not just from a global crisis but from an imminent extinction event.

He marshalled all the evidence he could to get us to act… and fast.

Global warming wasn’t a slow problem. It was a now-or-never problem. We had 10 years, maybe less.

There was no time to argue about methods or conclusions. The science – the science of what the future holds – was settled.

Two decades later, what sticks with me isn’t that Al Gore was wrong about climate change. The planet really has warmed slightly.

What sticks with me is that many of the most vivid, time-bound images he used to convey that danger didn’t happen on anywhere near the timeline he indicated.

The snow of Kilimanjaro didn’t vanish within a decade. Glacier National Park didn’t lose all its glaciers by 2020. Coastal cities weren’t inundated by rising sea levels. Florida wasn’t flooded under several feet of water.

He had told us an apocalypse was our default future.

The bottom line was clear: emissions go up, catastrophe follows, full stop. And this message was hysterically amplified by academia and the media.

Millions didn’t just suffer from generalized anxiety and a lack of sleep. Some forewent having children, since that would add to society’s carbon footprint and only hasten our extinction.

Gore – and his allies – made a deliberate rhetorical choice, driven by the belief that people wouldn’t act unless they were terrified.

And for a while, that strategy worked. It galvanized attention. It moved the issue into the mainstream.

But it also planted a time bomb. When deadlines passed and the world didn’t end on schedule, skepticism grew – not just about the messaging, but about the problem itself.

Today we have a much more realistic picture of the threat caused by human carbon emissions, as well as what we can do to mitigate them and adapt to a changing climate, without bringing global growth and prosperity to a halt.

Unfortunately, reasoned discourse doesn’t sell newspapers.

So today the voices of doom have a new bogeyman: not climate change but runaway AI – and I give them low marks for originality – as an imminent extinction event.

Once again, serious people are talking about a real, complex risk.

And once again, the loudest versions of the story leap straight to the most cinematic endpoint: superhuman AI escapes control, seizes infrastructure, and wipes out humanity, maybe within a couple of decades.

Timelines are compressed. Uncertainties are flattened. Speculative chains of events are narrated with a confidence that feels eerily familiar.

Notice the same patterns. Extreme scenarios are framed as likely rather than possible.

Institutional constraints – hardware limits, governance, human countermeasures – are treated as footnotes.

None of this requires denying that AI poses serious risks. It plainly does.

But be wary when the scariest version of a story is presented as the baseline rather than the tail end of a distribution.

Once again, urgency is being manufactured by compressing timelines, simplifying uncertainty, and discounting human response.

We don’t need extinction-by-2040 narratives to justify safety research or caution. Just as we didn’t need underwater cities on a 2020 timetable to justify cutting emissions.

Treating worst-case futures as destiny may motivate in the short term, but it corrodes trust over the long term.

The lesson from Gore’s climate warnings is that drama has a cost. Real risks deserve serious attention, not theatrical certainty.

When you hear confident predictions of imminent civilizational collapse – whether from rising seas or runaway algorithms – you might pause, zoom out, and ask whether we’re looking at the center of the forecast, or a remote possibility.

No one can say exactly where AI – or artificial superintelligence – will ultimately lead us.

But there are good reasons to believe that it will help us a lot more than it will hurt us in the short run.

That’s something that investors everywhere should understand and capitalize on.