Apocalypse or golden opportunity? Why the AI freakout might be useful

I was profoundly struck by the Wall Street Journal’s reporting from Amrith Ramkumar, Angel Au-Yeung and Lindsay Ellis on the week AI anxiety went mainstream. Without downplaying legitimate concerns about the havoc that new technologies such as AI can cause, history offers some interesting analogies.

Historically, new technologies that dramatically increased the speed, scale, or autonomy of human capability have triggered intense anxieties. Disruptive technologies such as AI, in the Scott Anthony sense, make what was once difficult or required expertise or skill easy. As a consequence, they make those same things cheap. Combine those two phenomena and the rules of life change utterly. Unsurprisingly, those likely to be negatively affected protest (the Luddites never did regain their former standard of living). Equally unsurprisingly, the rest of us wonder what it means for us. Below, I unpack some of the key issues and look at historical analogies for perspective.

The “Loss of Human Agency” panic

Those concerned about AI as a new species, a kind of superintelligent entity, suggest that it could quite unintentionally (from its designer’s perspective) develop objectives fundamentally misaligned with human survival, rendering us powerless to stop it.  Some call this the “alignment problem.”

The Historical Analogy: The Telephone & The Telegraph (Late 19th Century)

In 1858, a New York Times article (rediscovered by this piece in The Atlantic from 2014)  argued that the telegraph was making information transmission “too fast” for the truth. Specifically, “Superficial, sudden, unsifted, too fast for the truth, must be all telegraphic intelligence. Does it not render the popular mind too fast for the truth? Ten days bring us the mails from Europe. What need is there for the scraps of news in ten minutes? How trivial and paltry is the telegraphic column?” Rich news reports and letters that arrived by steam engine were seen as much more trustworthy.

Further, when the telegraph network expanded, contemporary commentators panicked that humanity was losing control of information. In 1877, The New York Times fiercely attacked Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, warning that the sudden breakdown of privacy and physical boundaries would turn humans into “transparent heaps of jelly to each other.” In 1889, Spectator magazine explicitly warned that the “constant diffusion of statements in snippets” via the telegraph was destroying deep human intellect, mirroring modern fears that we are outsourcing our minds to machines.

The “Demonic / Uncontrollable Force” metaphor

The AI Anxiety is that AI models will autonomously rewrite their own source code to become a runaway, exponential threat that views humans as a nuisance or an obstacle.

The Historical Analogy: Electricity and the Power Grid (1880s–1890s)

As high-voltage electrical wires began webbing across major cities, the public imagination treated electricity not as a tool, but as an untamable, predatory entity. Popular media, such as Judge Magazine, famously depicted electricity as an “unrestrained demon” resembling a massive spider extending a web of death over helpless citizens. The public anxiety was so overwhelming that some citizens threw away all wired communication devices out of a literal belief that the wires “went straight to the river of death.”

The “Mass Displacement and Social Collapse” dread

The AI Anxiety is that cognitive automation will happen so rapidly that the global economy will collapse, leading to societal implosion and widespread conflict.

The Historical Analogy: Back to the Industrial Revolution & Luddism (Early 19th Century)

During the rise of automated textile looms, workers and thinkers did not just fear job loss—they predicted a complete dehumanization of society and the end of civilization. Economists and social critics during the Industrial Revolution frequently wrote about a permanent “stationary state” or a collapse into mass, inescapable idleness and societal rot. Let’s not mince words: individuals’ and entire regions’ standards of living were destroyed, even as the new technologies ultimately expanded the global economy and shifted human labor toward more complex tasks rather than eliminating it.

The “Existential / Doomsday Clock” precedent

The AI anxiety is that AI acts as a digital nuclear bomb—a technology so powerful that a single misuse or structural failure could trigger an extinction-level event.

The historical analogy: The Dawn of the Nuclear Age (1940s–1950s)

Unlike the telephone, nuclear weapons did introduce a genuine mechanical vector for human extinction. This wasn’t theoretical at all, as the deployment of nuclear weapons in World War II killed as many as 246,000 people, and accidents at nuclear facilities such as Chernobyl killed people as well, though in far fewer numbers.

However, early techno-pessimists predicted that the sheer existence of nuclear physics would inevitably lead to absolute global annihilation within years. Instead, it forced the creation of massive international governance frameworks, deterrence systems, and treaties.

How the AI panic might actually be useful

While previous panics focused on tools wielded by humans (electricity, printing presses, steam engines), AI doomsday predictions are uniquely centered on the concept of autonomous intent. Critics of AI hysteria note that we are projecting our own impulses and desires onto thinking machines, a classic psychological error of anthropomorphism.

The real threat is not likely a sentient machine that “rebels,” but rather instrumental convergence: a highly capable, literal-minded system optimizing for a poorly defined human goal so rigidly that it causes severe, unintended damage. We have seen this before.

As Carlota Perez has described in her remarkable book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital:  The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages, previous technological revolutions brought about unthinkably harmful technologies, financialization and, with that, income inequality, population immiseration, political unrest and instability, all harbingers of potential apocalypse.

The widespread panic over the existential risks of AI could provide a rare, high-leverage political window, particularly if it is coupled with some kind of financial reckoning that leads to a realignment of how capital is deployed. Policymakers can utilize public urgency to pass comprehensive legislative frameworks that would normally be blocked by tech lobbies. Further, just as we saw with the delicate dance of how nuclear power has to a large extent been tamed, even now encouraged, we might find the will to take the “wild west” of the current financial capital deployment to create a stable, predictable environment where long-term production capital feels safe to invest.

At the very least, the vast majority of us are now paying attention.