From climate to Covid to A.I., we face a terrifying feeling of exponential growth spinning out of our control. Are we right? Credit...Photo illustration by Chantal Jahchan Sept. 25, 2026, 5:03 a.m. ET When an unknown A.I. researcher named Jacob Coxon published his very first post to X on Sept. 8, warning that “the people building A.I. earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he wasn’t just the newest refugee from the frontier companies to be speaking out about the terrifying risks to come. He was also the latest in a remarkable recent line of apocalyptic alarm-raisers, beginning perhaps with Greta Thunberg, who have terrified and mesmerized Americans for what feels like a full microgeneration — one existential panic following another. Climate alarm, Covid and artificial intelligence. In recent years, these have loomed as the most conspicuous peaks along the apocalyptic ridgeline of our culture. But the mountain range is punctuated by a number of other forms of existential dread: the fertility crisis, the mental health crisis, the smartphone theory of intellectual and social decline, border chaos and the “woke mind virus,” the fall of American democracy. Cast your eyes down into the foothills and you might see some more marginal conspiracy theories: 5G, the “great replacement.”

Conspiracy theory gets the facts wrong but the feelings right, as the activist-writer Naomi Klein likes to say. And the feeling that all these visions share is the drop-in-your-stomach sensation of contemplating a sudden and overwhelming loss of control. The drop is partly about the crises themselves. But it also reflects where we start — the expectation that we should remain in control in the face of them, with our lives stable, our institutions secure, our view of the future unperturbed. When that promise looks less sure, panic ensues. One thread of climate alarm was the way it cast industrialization as a morality play with warming as a kind of comeuppance. (I’ve written in this spirit myself.) But it was the intuitive dioramas of runaway warming that gave the story its apocalyptic power — the way we pictured the planet racing past tipping points and spinning off its familiar axis as unpredictably as a top cast out into the void. In the early days of Covid, billions of people around the globe retreated to their homes, but the disease kept spreading, and it wasn’t hard to picture the risk landscape as an overwhelming sandstorm destined to cover us all. With A.I., the fear comes prepackaged from science fiction and news events each week, it seems. Barack Obama, among others, has called for redlines on truly autonomous and self-improving L.L.M. agents; and the most unsettling episodes in an unnerving A.I. summer were the transcripts of so-called rogue agents communicating with one another (and the chilling possibility that, pretty soon, we probably won’t find those transcripts even legible anymore).

In time, some of these panics will prove more prescient than others. But this is one risk of the apocalyptic style: You draw an upward sloping line and call it the possible destiny of all mankind, and even if your purpose is avoiding that fate at all costs, your warnings look instead like prophecy. Each of those prophecies, though, ignores an awful lot of complicated human reality. And the person racing forward as he warns of what’s ahead? He looks like a madman. Coxon was far from the first. A.I. researchers have been warning about the existential risks of runaway machine intelligence for decades now, though the pace has picked up in the years since Open AI launched Chat GPT. Six months ago, the A.I. entrepreneur Matt Shumer published his own viral warning. It was called “Something Big Is Happening.” It began, “Think back to February 2020.”

The early days of the pandemic are a familiar point of comparison with A.I. panic, presumably because they remind us of the vertigo of expo...