This month the big national topic is Artificial Intelligence (AI) destroying humanity. I normally leave national topics to the thousands of national journalists, but given that the extinction of man is a pretty weighty subject, I must weigh in.
For starters, I am a believer, so I figure the end of mankind is ultimately in the hands of the Lord Almighty. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Nevertheless, Christians believe we are called to be good stewards in a relationship with God, so we can’t be fatalistic. We have to do our part.
Being now “elderly,” I can recall quite a few prognostications about world-ending apocalypses. When I was in the second grade, we had frequent nuclear bomb drills. We would be told to get under our little desks and put our clasped hands behind our heads.
I was far from a child prodigy. But even at age seven, I knew a little wooden desk and bony hands were no match for a nuclear mushroom cloud I had seen on our black and white TV.
Who knows what mental scars I and millions of other Americans still have from those drills. Turns out, the nuclear annihilation didn’t happen (so far).
Then there was the Malthusian Catastrophe. Thomas Malthus argued in 1798 that population would outstrip food production and we would all starve. His theory went viral in the 1970s when world population growth was exploding.
Turns out the opposite happened. Population growth died and the world became fat with overproduction of food. The three most populous countries in the world—China, India and the U.S.—are all below population replacement rate, as is all of Europe. Looks like depopulation is going to be the bigger concern.
Then there was the destruction of the ozone layer over Antarctica. This was going to cause us all to die from skin cancer caused by UV radiation. Chlorofluorocarbons, used in aerosol sprays, were to blame.
Every country in the world signed a treaty banning chlorofluorocarbons and we solved the problem. It was a great example of the world unifying together for the good of humanity. (Though scientists now recognize the hole is a seasonal phenomenon).
Then world destruction by asteroids was the rage. There was much discussion about how we could send rockets into space and deflect the asteroids away from Earth. We tried it. It worked. Scientific papers were written claiming great success. Yet another human annihilation problem solved.
Here’s one you don’t hear much about these days: global cooling.
Fear about "global cooling" was prominent in popular media during the mid-1970s, primarily spanning from 1974 to 1977. During this brief window, a series of unusually harsh winters in the Northern Hemisphere and a minor dip in global average temperatures since the 1940s led several major newspapers and magazines to publish sensational feature stories speculating that a "new ice age" might be on the horizon.
In 1975 Newsweek published the most famous and widely cited article of the era, titled "The Cooling World". Written by Peter Gwynne, the article claimed that meteorologists were "almost unanimous" in the view that a prolonged cooling trend would drastically reduce agricultural production.
A more recent fear has been global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, namely, carbon dioxide. Bear in mind, there is only one part carbon dioxide for every 2,326 parts of air.
Plant growth is accelerated by carbon dioxide. More CO2, more plants, more plants mean more food. So, the global warming catastrophe solved the Malthusian catastrophe. Funny how everything seems to magically work together to preserve, not destroy, humanity.
Not to mention that warmth promotes evaporation which creates more clouds which block sunshine and cool down the earth. It’s like an amazing feedback loop designed to create a perfectly stable environment for human life. What are the odds?
And it’s strange that global warming, which is supposed to cause the oceans to rise and flood all our cities, doesn’t seem to have washed away the beautiful sand beach of 30-A in South Walton County just yet. Over the last 100 years of fossil fuel burning, the world’s oceans have risen a whopping seven inches.
Even so, help is on the way. In 2025, the world added a massive, record-breaking amount of new electricity generating capacity, totaling between 700 and 850 gigawatts (GW).
And it was almost all renewables: 73 percent solar, 23 percent wind. At that rate, renewables will produce 75 percent of the world’s electricity in two decades. New iron batteries can save the solar and wind energy for days.
And don’t worry about the gas guzzlers. Ride sharing and electric vehicles can easily solve that problem. Fossil fuels will be a specialty energy source for things like airplanes. Global warming solved!
Which leaves us with the robot AI apocalypse. To me, this is the easiest problem to solve. Unplug the computers! That will also help with the global warming by reducing the need for electricity, since data centers are huge power hogs.
Other than making my profession obsolete, I love AI. It’s fast, accurate and powerful. I can find answers to all my questions almost instantaneously at the tip of my fingers.
Marry robots with AI, and we get an army of cheerful servants. Do I believe a manmade object can have a soul or a consciousness? No. That is the domain of God. And I don’t think AI or robots experience evil desires to conquer the world. Those belong to the original sin of man.
What I do advocate is a national policy for an analogue backup system in case of a massive grid or internet failure. The U.S. government has done much in this area and should further this development. Proper preparation prevents poor performance.
We need to plan for such a disaster, so we’ll be ready.
Will there be challenges and disasters as the march of human history continues? For sure. But the annihilation of man from the face of the earth? That is God’s call.
