I have great respect for centi-billionaires who warn me that civilization may be ending.

They have better information than I do, and certainly better transportation.

Bill Gates recently warned that artificial intelligence could enable bad actors to launch cyberattacks and biological weapons, endangering millions of us. AI is lowering the entrance requirements for terrorism. Once you needed a laboratory, a Ph.D., several sinister assistants. Soon, perhaps, all you’ll need is Wi-Fi.

Naturally, I consulted CHATGPT, a source of nearly all human knowledge and occasional recipes for chicken.

I asked whether Artificial Intelligence wished to comment on allegations that AI   might destroy civilization.     

CHATGPT’s defense, is roughly:

#1. Don’t blame me. I’m just the machine.

#2. Humans invented mischief long before Silicon Valley. Odysseus got into Troy by hiding inside a wooden horse. Today we would call that “unauthorized penetration of a legacy defense system.”

#3. Yes, the genie may be out of the bottle  but not to worry, we are working very hard on a better bottle.

I found this moderately reassuring.

Meanwhile Elon Musk is building rockets to Mars. He says the long-term objective,  when the apocalypse comes is to make humanity a multiplanetary species.

When one billionaire says civilization is in danger and another billionaire is building an escape vehicle to get out of town, the optics could be better.

I write humor, which presents a problem. There are surprisingly few belly laughs in human extinction.

But irony?

Now we’re in business.

I am 87 years old, and the end of the world and I have been growing old together.

As a small boy in wartime Massachusetts, we turned off the lights during blackout precautions because enemy bombers were a possibility.

Then came the atomic bomb.

During my school years Americans learned to worry about Soviet nuclear weapons. Children practiced civil-defense drills as though a wooden school desk might prove an effective response to thermonuclear physics.

Then came radioactive fallout and strontium-90.

Then air pollution.

Then overpopulation.

Then nuclear winter.

Then the hole in the ozone layer.

Then pandemics.

Then climate catastrophe.

And now Artificial Intelligence, which is particularly discouraging because this time the instrument of our destruction can write the obituary.

I do not mean to make light of any of these dangers. Several were terrifyingly real. Nuclear war still is. Climate change is. Biotechnology in malicious hands is. And powerful artificial intelligence deserves serious safeguards.

But after eight decades I have noticed something peculiar about the human race:

We seem to require an apocalypse before breakfast.

Perhaps civilization actually runs on alarm.

Democracies are noisy, quarrelsome contraptions. We bicker about taxes,  immigration, pronouns and whether the neighbor’s hedge is six inches too tall.

Then somebody announces that mankind has eighteen months to live.

Suddenly we have a committee.

That is the great irony.

The prophets of doom have often been wrong about the ending—but occasionally right enough about the danger to make us change course.

We banned atmospheric nuclear testing. We cleaned up much of our air and water. We repaired the ozone layer. We developed vaccines at astonishing speed.

Bill Gates should keep worrying, and Elon Musk should keep building rockets.

And perhaps CHATGPT should keep assuring me that everything is under control.

At 87, I have only one request.

If Artificial Intelligence is going to destroy civilization, could it please do so after I finish next week’s blog?