Chapter 07 · 2026 – present
When Prophecy Fails
the prophecy recedes; the apparatus grows
Overview
By 2026, the old FOOM scenario had still not materialized. AI progress looked nothing like a small team pushing one system through recursive self-improvement in a matter of hours. It looked like datacenters, larger training runs, staggering capital expenditure, and products released into ordinary life. The institutions built during the years of imminent-risk advocacy did not disappear with that mismatch. By then, they had staff, donors, publications, political contacts, and an audience of their own.
The campaign also found support among people whose concerns had little to do with hard takeoff. Projects such as PDKU brought AI doom to audiences outside the old rationalist subculture. Food & Water Watch connected the issue to local fights over datacenters. Sanders focused on automation, employment, and concentrated wealth. Ocasio-Cortez added surveillance, rising electricity costs, and the jars of brown well water brought by Georgia residents who blamed a nearby Meta development, though Meta disputed the connection. The resulting moratorium could be presented as an answer to extinction risk, layoffs, corporate power, pollution, utility bills, and pressure on local water supplies all at once. Its supporters did not need to agree about FOOM, or even believe in it, to support the same policy.
The April attack on Sam Altman’s home raised a more difficult question about what happens when apocalyptic language leaves the page. There is no evidence that PauseAI organized, approved, or had prior knowledge of the attack. The group condemned it and said that the accused had never held a position within the organization. That distinction matters. Still, the incident made it harder to dismiss the relationship between extinction rhetoric and fringe action as entirely hypothetical.
A miniature version of the discourse could be seen online, where arguments about AI policy increasingly became arguments about whether particular people should remain employed. Liron Shapira called two aspects of a Sébastien Krier post “fireable.” Andrew Ho’s departure from OpenAI was later circulated as evidence that he had been dismissed, although he had already announced that he was leaving to start a company and later denied the firing story directly. Collectively, these events show how quickly disagreement can become a question of loyalty once the issue is framed as an emergency. In a situation where AI development is seen as a crisis that poses an imminent danger to humanity, even something as simple as making a joke or an argument can become the basis for a demand to have someone fired, while resistance to a moratorium can be cast as helping the danger along.
Predictions in this chapter
No dated predictions are assigned to this chapter.