A Decalogue for the End of the World

A preliminary note and a word of caution: the subject matter is macabre, but here we’re trying to stay cheerful even in the face of total ruin. Until you’re twenty – when the world simply cannot end – you tend to imagine the end of the world as a massive, biblical event. Black horsemen, locusts, the sea turning red, the asteroid. Blockbuster films reinforced this optimism during the 1990s: Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck were dispatched into space in their spacesuits to drill and save the planet. There was always confidence that the Americans would prevail, and that the savior would be a muscular, good-looking man with thinning hair, just like Bruce. A good American. Now we’ve got Trump, and he’s not saving anyone. For a few years now, the apocalypse has had a diversified portfolio. The list now includes climate change, Putin’s bomb, viruses, AI, and financial collapse—with the distinct possibility that they could strike simultaneously. It is advisable to begin with AI, as it is the latest item on the agenda. A recent article in The Guardian highlights a grim convergence among figures who rarely intersect: Bernie Sanders, Bill Gates, and even AI companies have begun discussing a slowdown. Yes, yes, let’s take it down a notch – I’ll join the chorus: AI is fine as it is; it serves no other purpose – as long as it takes care of our emails, slides and meeting summaries, we serfs are already in heaven.

Summary: Gates argues that the transition to AI could be one of the most turbulent periods in history: many jobs could disappear, inequalities could rise, and current institutions are unprepared. Sanders has called on OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta to pause the development of advanced models. The Guardian article concludes with a spectacular solution: Europe is Bruce Willis because, through the Dutch firm ASML and its lithography machines – which are indispensable for the most advanced chips – it holds one of the very few bottlenecks in the AI gold rush. Blocking their exports would mean throwing a spanner in the works on a global scale and buying time. This notion of the more cautious part of the world acting as heroic saboteurs is appealing.

However, let us now turn to the ‘end-of-the-world’ catalogue ranking, as updated in September 2026.

A classic, robust narrative. In the cinema, the threat was often averted by a clever, slightly down-on-his-luck agent who’d been through the mill, had a difficult childhood and been left by his wife due to poor communication and emotional aloofness (he still loves her). It remains the go-to scenario for the end of the world because, in a full-blown thermonuclear war, everything is over in a matter of minutes. The current situation calls for precision: in recent months, Russia has carried out nuclear exercises, and Putin continues to present the nuclear arsenal as a major guarantee. More likely, however, are scattered drones, cyber-attacks and other minor provocations.

It’s the new competitor. A rampant end of the world I never imagined. Excellent prospects for plausibility, and it encompasses several variants: systems that penetrate computer networks, computer-aided design of biological agents, and autonomous weapons.

The worst-case scenario, because it’s all too easy – and far too humiliating – to cast the first stone and the last, and the stones all come back to hit us on the head: it must have been our fault. The prospect of an Apocalypse that resembles an administrative nemesis is disheartening: heat, drought, floods, crop failures, mass migration, and power grids melting down. It is an unbearable sense of guilt for having brought this upon ourselves through neglect.

However, there is another, truly dreadful scenario for the end of the world. The equation goes like this: (increasingly accessible synthetic biology) + (systems capable of supporting research). The virus acts on its own, without the bat.

It isn’t quite the end of humanity as we know it; it’s more the end of the way we used to be. Gates insists on the point: AI could replace jobs in law, medicine, software, customer service and manufacturing, creating a structural problem rather than a normal cyclical recession. Here we have a reversible apocalypse: we could intervene with textbook solutions, provided that in the meantime we haven’t all been turned into idiots by a lack of mental exercise.

At last we can breathe a sigh of relief: the old economic catastrophe. Trillions invested in chips and data centres; the bubble bursts and humanity is left in its wake. But not for long, because that’s what we’re good at – we know how to get back on our feet and channel the spirit of Ulysses. In such circumstances, we of the human race are even capable of giving our very best. I’d almost not be afraid – almost.