The apocalypse of artificial intelligence, perhaps

When the sun went dark, we baby boomers – born into a miracle that seemed never-ending – were little more than children. The eclipse that made Michelangelo Antonioni famous and launched his muse Monica Vitti sent a chill down our spines: having barely entered life, our fleeting time was already drawing to a close, and history was fading into the unknown before we could even come to know it. It was 15 February 1961, and the Apocalypse was postponed. Not by much – just a few months – until 14 October 1962, when the countdown began: two weeks to nuclear Armageddon, with Soviet missiles already in Cuba, aimed at Florida. Even then, the prophecy was not fulfilled—not thanks to the laws of astrophysics, but because of the choice made by men of good will. The very same men who, shortly afterwards, began to spread new fears. In the 1970s came the announcement of the ‘Coming Dark Ages’, as Roberto Vacca’s essay was titled. In that same year, 1971, a series of best-selling books were published (‘The Suicide Society’ by the British science writer Gordon Rattray Taylor, ‘The Last Days of Mankind’ by the ecologist Samuel Mines), Alberto Moravia wrote ‘In Defence of Nature’ in the *Corriere della Sera*, and then came Aurelio Peccei – a Fiat manager, not a dreamy artist – who, with the Club of Rome’s report on ‘The Limits to Growth’, made everyone aware that the Earth has non-renewable resources, which will soon be exhausted if exploited to the full, and that ‘black gold’ will be the first to run out. In short, we baby boomers have grown old with the nightmare of the Apocalypse hanging over us.

We had barely had time to witness globalisation, the dream of perpetual peace and a ‘flat world’, and the advent of a new humanity that had gradually made its way from the Far East into the West. That vision was abruptly interrupted on 11 September 2001, during the 102 minutes in which the Four Horsemen lashed out at the symbols of progress, prosperity, ‘good’ capitalism and the benevolent empire. It was no easy task to stop them; the West did not collapse then, but Peter Thiel – a man who plays chess with the Antichrist, like the knight in Ingmar Bergman’s film – maintains that the forces of Evil have never ceased; only a small core of supermen could truly avert the end of time. Some argue that humanity began its backward march a quarter of a century ago, as fear, suspicion and vengeance have consigned hope, exchange and forgiveness to the dustbin of history. Today, as the hubris and arrogance of pure reason – unchecked by judgement and morality – appear poised to break the seventh seal, The Exterminating Angel makes the headlines, rages across social media and is re-aired with frenzied relish on television screens. Will there be men of good will this time too?

What is certain is that, in just a few years, the new century seems to have consumed what had been built up over the previous half-century. In 2008, turbo-finance capitalism collapsed – or rather, ‘Western capitalism’, as the Chinese put it. With the optimism of reason, the pieces were pieced back together. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, the worst in over a hundred years. Was it human error, a horrific conspiracy, or divine punishment? Other people of good will found remedies such as vaccines, among which the most sci-fi of all is the messenger RNA vaccine, which uses genetic information to target the virus. Humanity has been saved—but only just. Anti-vax advocates are up in arms because medicine has altered the code of life, and who knows what monsters may be born. Now we have fallen into the trap of artificial intelligence. Even those who unleashed the Beast are beginning to feel afraid. We are moving too fast; it is time to pause. Dario Amodei fears we have reached the point of no return, when the machine no longer even needs to break its chains because it is capable of doing everything on its own; and truly everything – the alpha and the omega, good and evil. His former colleague, now rival, Sam Altman, and even Elon Musk seem convinced of this. Artificial intelligence is getting out of hand; it might even become self-aware, warns The Economist. What are we to do? How much time do we have left before the Apoc-AI-lypse? Old and ever-new Cassandras are back to passing judgement: Naomi Klein, the high priestess of No Logo (and No Global), together with the Canadian activist and filmmaker Astra Taylor, writes about the advent of ‘end-times fascism’ thanks to the convergence of the far right, nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence. Javier Milei, who lives with cloned dogs, takes an apocalyptic view in the opposite direction: he proposes that chatbots should run companies; so much for not only blue-collar workers but also managers – everyone will be selling soya to the Chinese so they can enjoy their earnings in Miami. Olé.

Joseph Stiglitz proposes a third way: if properly regulated and used, AI can truly usher in ‘an era of superabundance’. In his lengthy article published by the Financial Times, the Nobel laureate in economics makes points that might appeal to Pope Leo and puts forward a “progressive agenda”, calling on leaders in the high-tech industry to join this march towards a magnificent new future. Franco Bernabé introduces a new dimension of technological sovereignty based not on the dominance of the strongest, but on realism and open debate. It is impossible to catch up with American models, let alone succumb to Chinese shortcuts. “The aim cannot be to reconstruct the entire artificial intelligence value chain within national borders,” he writes in Rivista AI. “Sovereignty must be understood in a more precise and operational sense: as the capacity to choose. It means being able to decide which dependencies to accept and which to avoid, being able to verify where one’s data is stored and who has access to it, and being able to replace a supplier when contractual, geopolitical or technological conditions so require.” This is a fundamental distinction for Italy’s manufacturing sector “because the playing field is not generically digital, but industrial”. The great debate on the dilemma of our time thus shifts from the metaphysical to the physical. And the political. With a touch of irony, Paul Krugman acknowledges that Amodei has social and ethical qualms, but in reality the tech magnates, in their cynical opportunism, want to save themselves and humanity not from artificial intelligence, but from Donald Trump (the mid-term election debacle is looming).

But what exactly occurred that was so startling as to make the pot boil over? It turns out that, in their laboratory, the researchers effectively opened Pandora’s box. Signs had already been multiplying until, according to a compelling account, researchers at Anthropic, in an experiment with the Claude Sonnet 4.5 model, began to investigate the various layers making up the artificial neural network, using a mathematical tool developed specifically for this purpose. They asked the ‘machine’ to count to five and then count back, and saw unexpected expressions emerge such as ‘countdown’ or ‘halfway’, until the word ‘consciousness’ appeared, followed by ‘artificial intelligence’. The technicians decided to stop there. ‘It’s done,’ comments Claude – yes, that very same Claude – before they pull the plug on him. And everyone shudders. The linguistic model was behaving, albeit in a rudimentary way, like a network of neurons in the human brain in that area known as the ‘working memory’, that is, when signals arriving from different, isolated parts begin to relate to one another. It is at this point, according to neuroscientists, that a person begins to consciously utilise the body of information received. And it was precisely at that point that the new Fausts sounded the alarm. Amodei asked himself how far one could still go and how far one was permitted to go. Thus, a new chapter began; the focus shifted from ‘how to do it’ to ‘what to do’.

‘Do absolutely nothing, carry on as you are,’ says Donald Trump; the United States has a clear advantage and must exploit it to the full. Whether this advantage exists and how long it will last remains to be seen, but a new arms race has begun. This is precisely what Alex Karp maintains – the man chosen by Peter Thiel to lead his company Palantir, the magic stone of the digital age. Karp explicitly speaks of a new Manhattan Project in his book "The Technological Republic". America was the first to develop the atomic bomb and the first to test it on the Japanese people. However morally appalling this decision may have been, it cemented its superiority over the Soviet Union and the entire world. The same must now happen (indeed, it is already happening, according to Karp) with artificial intelligence. Henry Kissinger, a leading figure of the American century, does not reject the comparison, but for this very reason proposes a system of cross-checks on the use of AI similar to that established for nuclear weapons. In his intellectual testament, written in collaboration with Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher, after advocating for a sort of non-proliferation treaty, he concludes the chapter on security and world order—penned by him—with these words: “In the age of artificial intelligence, the constant pursuit of national advantage must be guided by an ethic of preserving humanity”. It seems like a pre-emptive response to the stance taken by Trump and, not coincidentally, by Xi Jinping, both of whom are keen to push the challenge beyond the limits of human reason.

The AI apocalypse is not the only thing fuelling our nightmares. What we might call the ‘mini-Armageddons’ are no less dangerous; they are generating more anxiety, concern and harmful effects than artificial intelligence itself. The war in Ukraine could end if the ‘Kissinger method’ were followed; the same applies to the Middle East or to preventing the coming war, when China invades Taiwan. The “Mazarin of the 20th century” had developed a theory of regional powers and believed that entrusting them with a degree of control over their respective spheres of influence would give substance to that multipolar balance which, without the exercise of economic and military force, remained a sort of Kantian utopia. China has taken advantage of this and, from being a regional power, has become a global one. The United States did not believe in this approach and has gradually abandoned even its own allies. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is reviving the idea, but perhaps it is too late: many small powers do not create a new superpower. If anything, they may serve to cool tensions between Washington and Beijing – a defensive tactic that does not dispel the spectre of apocalypse.

The Pasdaran regime was expected to collapse under the weight of U.S. super-bombs, yet it has now blockaded the Persian Gulf and is extending its reach into the Red Sea as well. Benjamin Netanyahu had vowed to wipe out Hamas and Hezbollah, but failed to do so. So much for the Abraham Accords: princes and sheikhs no longer feel protected by the United States and are working towards ‘the atomic crescent’ alongside Pakistan. So much for non-proliferation – everyone wants the Bomb. Why is it that Israel can have it but Saudi Arabia cannot? The British and French are prepared to use their capabilities to defend Europe from Russia, which has established a massive base for nuclear-tipped missiles between Poland and Lithuania. The West has allowed Moscow to drive that thorn into its own side: Immanuel Kant’s old Königsberg, renamed Kaliningrad and cleansed of its original German inhabitants, is a powder keg. A gift to Stalin. Just as the entire nuclear arsenal deployed in Ukraine was a generous gift to post-Soviet Russia. So much for American imperialism, so much for the threat of European expansionism. Oligarchs are funding Trump’s son and paying for his wedding. ‘Trump’s house, Putin’s house’, wrote the journalist Craig Unger. We had to see this too.

Meanwhile, Europe is expected to face a gas shortage for the winter, and even if supplies do arrive, they will come at a very high cost. Strategic oil reserves are dwindling, while the continent remains far from self-sufficiency in renewable energy—an effort that has proven too little, too late. China is the world leader in solar and wind power, which account for 60 per cent of its total electricity capacity. Beijing has amassed more reserves than any other country thanks to crude oil from Indonesia and the Pacific, in addition to Arab oil, as well as nuclear power stations – not to mention coal for heavy industry. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll go to Mars,’ Musk proclaims, while he disseminates his genetic material in the hope that a lineage rich in ideas, utopias and dollars—yet potentially a breeding ground for nightmares—may emerge. In the meantime, Thiel has obtained an Argentine passport; others are taking refuge in New Zealand; and Musk might even return to his native South Africa, should he be welcomed. According to the human experts whose IQ is presumed to exceed that of the machines they design, only the southern hemisphere may escape the holocaust that is relentlessly approaching. But who will really be able to survive the freezing nuclear winter, and above all, who will want to?

We baby boomers would never have believed that we would have to face, right up to the very end, scenarios straight out of Mad Max, Cormac McCarthy or Philip K. Dick, with replicants rebelling in order to live longer. Even Claude will eventually say, like Roy Batty: ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… and all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.’