Our sense that life is meaningful depends, perhaps more than we realize, on our confidence that humanity will go on after we die. If we came to believe that humanity had no future, the philosopher Samuel Scheffler argues, much of what we value would lose its meaning or motivating force. What would follow would be widespread “apathy, anomie and despair.”
That is one reason why the threat of artificial intelligence feels so different and disorienting. When some of the most knowledgeable people within an industry suggest that their work could, within a matter of years, lead to global catastrophe and even human extinction, it’s decidedly unnerving. AI-driven anxiety is now showing up in therapy offices across the country. Much of what has given people succor in the past—faith that there are good things and good people who will outlive us, and that the story will go on—feels like it might be suddenly removed.
Consider the dread, even the paralyzing fear, you might feel if you were told as you prepared to fly that your plane has a 1-in-100 chance of crashing, or perhaps even a 1-in-10 chance. You probably wouldn’t board the aircraft. With AI, though, there’s no opting out. Even worse, if the plane you boarded did crash, it would be a terrible, localized tragedy. But the world would go on; your children would outlive you. Some of the primary architects of AI, though, are talking about the permanent end of the human species. Perhaps they are wrong; other experts are less concerned with AI destroying humanity than with it being unreliable, misused, or recklessly deployed. Their warnings, though, are hard to ignore.
[Juliette Kayyem: Destroying humanity is against the law]
It is better that we name the fear honestly rather than avoid it: All of us may soon perish, and everything we have made may go with us. Then we need to separate the urgent practical questions—what do we do to prevent the worst from happening?—from the existential. How should we live in light of the possibility, however remote, of the end of all that we have known and loved and has ever been?
As the focus on the existential threats posed by AI increases, people will exhibit a range of responses. Robert Jay Lifton coined the term psychic numbing to describe what he saw among survivors of Hiroshima: a protective shutdown of emotional responses in the face of catastrophic events or potentially overwhelming trauma. It allows us to keep functioning. There can also be denial—a sense that the prospects are so awful that they can’t be true, and even if they are, there’s nothing we can individually do about it.
Still others are tempted toward “information avoidance,” in which we ignore information because we’re afraid of an unpleasant outcome. Some set the threat aside as best as they can, a bit like avoiding a visit to a doctor out of fear that the physician will confirm a serious, even life-threatening illness. Still others drift toward a nihilism that ends in despair. Our time horizons will also shift. When the future itself seems in doubt, the long-term commitments that sustain a meaningful life can start to seem pointless.
My own reaction has been to search for footholds of reasonable hope. I’ve looked to knowledgeable voices for reassurance. I don’t have certainty that things will turn out just fine, but I want to believe that there are promising paths forward and what we do still matters. I should acknowledge, too, that the idea of an extinction-level threat doesn’t yet fully register with me. Because nothing like this has ever happened before, my instinctive assumption is that it never will. And, of course, it may not. But it would be foolhardy not to contemplate the possibility.
Viktor Frankl found meaning in life amid the horror of Auschwitz. Though we cannot control external events, he believed, we can retain control over our interior world. We choose how we respond to circumstances we did not create, to cups we would prefer to let pass. This “tragic optimism” is the capacity to say yes to life despite enormous suffering. Meaning can be chiseled even out of anguish. The impermanence of things is no reason for despair; instead, it increases the urgency to make meaning of the time we have, the moments in which we live, and the things we choose to love. The question is always what life is asking of us in every situation we face. And the answer is that life asks us to live lives of integrity, honor, and devotion to things and people outside of ourselves, to celebrate truth and beauty even in dark times.
“A thought transfixed me,” Frankl wrote, in Man’s Search for Meaning. “For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.”
He added, “For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in the perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.’” Meaning is found not only in what we accomplish but also in beholding what we love.
ALBERT CAMUS’ 1947 NOVEL, THE PLAGUE, is a tale of horror, survival, and resilience in the face of a devastating epidemic. The story’s protagonist, Bernard Rieux, is a dedicated, resolute physician in the Algerian city of Oran. He embodies what Jean Tarrou, a visitor who organizes volunteer sanitary squads, calls a “true healer.” Rieux fights the plague day after day, with no expectation of winning. He does so not because of heroism or religious faith but out of common decency. He believes that the only honest response to suffering is to do what one can to relieve it. That is what gives meaning to his life. The goal of Rieux and others was, in the words of David Bellos, a scholar of French fiction, “to preserve human dignity and to last the course, and in so doing to develop and to promote those virtues which misfortune can call forth: co-operation, solidarity, and the art of small kindness.”
Rieux names the threat posed by the epidemic early and honestly, when others are in denial, and then he acts. Camus, an agnostic, didn’t look to God or a higher power for meaning; he believed that the universe is inherently indifferent. Meaning, he argued, is found in human solidarity and the alleviation of suffering. Those remain intrinsic goods even if the world were to end tomorrow.
Living under the shadow of a grave threat shouldn’t be paralyzing; it should inspire resistance to injustice, despite the knowledge that such a struggle can never be fully won. C. S. Lewis, in his 1948 essay “On Living in an Atomic Age,” said that if the atomic bomb comes, it should find us doing sensible, human things: praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, chatting with our friends, and “not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.”
Perhaps that quiet courage came because for Lewis, a Christian, the end of the world did not represent the end of everything that matters. We are inhabiting an irrational universe, he believed, but we aren’t derived from it. Nature is alienated from its Creator too, he wrote—“though in her, as in us, gleams of the old beauty remain.”
HOW, THEN, SHOULD WE LIVE in light of the threat posed by AI? We should name rather than ignore the danger and do everything within our power to contain it. Experts are actively debating the right way to do that. Their suggestions include a laissez-faire, do-nothing approach; voluntary compliance within the industry; bilateral and international agreements; and state and federal regulations in America. But there’s clearly an urgency to act before we lose control of events—and our future.
Beyond that, it seems to me that we should acknowledge the fear that death, especially the prospect of mass death, brings up in all of us. Frankl and Camus had their approaches; we should answer what each moment asks of us. Decency and kindness don’t require external validation, whether a catastrophe is avoided or not. The psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, in his book Staring at the Sun, expressed the hope that an “awakening experience” might inspire us to rearrange our priorities, find compassionate connections, and love others and beauty more deeply.
[Ian Bogost: The thrill of wanting AI to destroy the world]
Yalom invoked Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, in which the protagonist, hours from death, having experienced horrifying pain, recognizes the shallowness and emptiness of what appears to have been, on the surface, a successful life. Because of his connection with his young son, who presses Ivan’s hands to his lips and weeps, Ivan “fell through and saw a light, and it was revealed to him that his life had been wrong but that it was still possible to mend things.” In the end, he does.
He searched for his old habitual fear of death and didn’t find it. Where was death? What death? There was no fear, because there was no death. Instead of death there was light. “So that’s it!” he suddenly said aloud. “Such joy!”
Ivan Ilyich’s final thoughts are “Death is finished. It is no more.”
T
olstoy, through Ivan Ilyich, was echoing a verse from the New Testament Book of Revelation. Written at the end of the first century, Revelation is an apocalyptic work filled with symbolism, vivid imagery, and coded references to the Roman Empire, which was oppressing Christians.
Revelation is hardly a favorite book of mine except for this: In the 21st chapter, we read that “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” And God promises, “Behold, I make all things new.”
I have cited those words to others, and to myself, more times than I can count. It is not a promise that the current world won’t end—after all, many New Testament writers believed that they were living in the end times—but rather that the world will then be renewed. The old order will give way to a new one, where creation is healed and justice is restored and God will ultimately reconcile every creature to himself.
Skeptics of Christianity will say this is wishful thinking, and perhaps it is. But wanting something to be true doesn’t make it false. Wishful thinking, tethered to reality, is another name for hope. Sometimes hope is all we have, and sometimes hope is enough.