by Steve Watson via Modernity News,
They received a new brief. The instant the AI-doom circuit kicked into gear the same 'protesters' who spent years on climate, oil and "Palestine" are back on the street with fresh banners declaring 'the end is nigh'.
The clips looping across X could be any march of the last decade. Same wardrobe. Same slogans. Same dead-eyed rhythm.
Only the monster changed.
Yesterday, dozens of them marched from OpenAI's Mission Bay headquarters to Anthropic's offices beside Salesforce's Dreamforce crowd, then on to San Francisco City Hall. 'Stop the AI Race' wanted Mayor Daniel Lurie to declare a local "AI state of emergency." Chalk on the pavement read "Extinction is on the table." Staff at both labs were told to quit.
Organiser Michaël Trazzi said industry leaders had asked Washington to regulate and been turned down. Fellow organiser Hunter Glenn told reporters, "I was pretty scared about the possibility of extinction for awhile," and called AI safety a bipartisan cause.
Other demonstrations dubbed 'PauseAI' and 'Pull The Plug' assembled outside Downing Street in London after Anthropic alignment lead Evan Hubinger said he personally believed there was a greater than 10 percent chance AI could "kill all humans" within a decade.
Their line: "10% chance of extinction? 100% chance of resistance."
These groups are full of pliable, already-petrified people who need the next extinction story the way some people need a weather report. Climate was going to cook them. A virus was going to finish them. Oil was going to drown them. "Palestine" was going to moralise them. Now the robots will delete them. They are desperate to believe anything will wipe them out, because a life without a scheduled apocalypse leaves them with nothing to virtue chant about.
That is why the propaganda works. They live wracked with fear and stay wide open to scaremongering on every topic conceivable. Hand them some dodgy stats and a Netflix documentary and they will screech into the streets. The content of the threat is secondary.
A U.S. pause would hand China the century's defining technology and freeze the labs already winning. Sam Altman went to Congress in 2023 asking for tighter rules after OpenAI already held a commanding lead - regulatory capture with a halo. OpenAI withheld GPT-2 in 2019 as too dangerous. It was fully out months later. No measurable harm.
Every AI doomsday call since the 1950s has missed. Europe sold GDPR as privacy and now hosts none of the world's dominant labs, because the rules decide who gets to build.
Computer science professor Pedro Domingos noted, "Europe actually passed this AI Act some years ago that puts draconian restrictions on AI," he said. "Europe is now out of the AI race. I hope we're not gonna let the same thing happen in America."
On the labs driving the panic: "I am much more worried about Anthropic than I am worried about AI." And: "These people think the apocalypse is coming... There's an AI god that's being born and they are the parents of that god."
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave the extinction industry a simpler number. There is a "0% chance" the world ends in 2030, however the risks are framed. "2030 is not going to be the end of the world." The man selling the chips that power the boom is not losing sleep over the apocalypse.
Scott Jennings had already mapped the rotation. "It's always the same apocalyptic crowd moving from one issue to the next. Responsible guardrails are one thing, but handicapping American innovation while China speeds ahead with zero regulation isn't sound policy - it's just foolish."
Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale told Jesse Watters the scare is not civic caution. It is a coordinated campaign. "These guys don't believe in God. They're atheists, but they've created something they believe is God," Watters said, laying out Lonsdale's point.
"This is their Messiah, and this is their end of the world." Lonsdale urged, adding "There is a coordinated campaign to make the American people afraid."
Lonsdale outlined how an industrial revolution is coming that would be "amazing for America if we get it right." The people trying to stop it, he said, "hate America."
Speaking of which, Bill Gates is also back on the emergency circuit calling AI an "alien intelligence."
"I don't think any government is nearly as deep on this as they have to be," he told Reuters. "Governments are way behind on this one."
Then the Hollywood script: "There's all sorts of movies where some aliens are coming, and magically the US and China and everybody comes together to solve the problem. AI is kind of like this alien intelligence. It's here, and we better do like it shows in those movies."
On a podcast he went further: "It's not the role of the industry to self-regulate or understand the whole-of-society impact that comes out of AI."
He wants a permanent cross-border watchdog stitched from nuclear inspections, aviation rules and ozone treaties - and a meeting with Xi Jinping.
His foundation pledged $1 billion over two years to spread AI through schools, clinics and farms in the same news cycle. Alarm in one hand. Pipeline in the other.
Bernie Sanders appeared at the Future of Life Institute's "Pro-Human Assembly" in Washington. Obama's orbit told Democrats to get "on top of" a technology "moving very fast in private hands." Netflix dropped an AI-doom documentary a producer compared to "An Inconvenient Truth" or "The Social Dilemma." Same template. New monster.
President Trump has already rejected the slowdown. "We're leading China in AI," he said. "Whoever wins AI, wins." A lot of the horror stories being shopped around, he added, "won't happen."
The protest addicts started marching the minute the fear campaign was turned up because they were already waiting for the next wipeout. The malleable mob arriving right on schedule - to demand Washington park a still-American lead under a global committee while Beijing keeps training.
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