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“There have always been incentives for top companies in an industry to call for regulations that give them a competitive advantage over upstart companies. Regulatory capture, as it is called, is a real concern. But is that what is going on here?” - Public Discourse

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Discussion

Tue, 10/20/26

It’s a bit hard to fit “AI doomsday” into biblical eschatology.

Not impossible, if you’re of the ‘Revelation and Daniel are apocalyptic genre and absolutely none of the visions are at all literal’ school of thought. I guess one of the ways it could play out in that eschatology is something like: ‘mankind destroys itself through its own technology, then Christ returns and establishes His eternal kingdom.’ Something like that?

It’s hard to accommodate any kind of millennial eschatology, though, especially pre- but also post- it seems to me.

What could happen, though, is that various nations/corporations/both hand too much decision-making over to agentic AIs, and various disasters of very large scale occur. Almost but not quite “humanity self destructs.”

So, I’m in the ‘not terrified but not exactly comfortable with what’s happening’ school of thought. I do think the technology calls for restraint. It’s easy to extrapolate from past technological leaps and assume things will go the same way, but this tech is in a different category from previous advances.

Take the printing press: you could look at it think “wow, that’s clever; why didn’t we think of it sooner?” but you understand almost immediately how it works.

The automobile: Most of us are like “well, stuff happens with fuel and an engine and wheels go round.” So for many, there isn’t full understanding, but a basic understanding. And potential understanding is huge, because it’s not all that hard to grasp the idea of fuel basically exploding in a cylinder and pushing up a part that makes a rod rotate… over and over really fast.

The computer: The actual and potential understanding capacity shrinks. Many only grasp that very tiny circuits somehow do lots of calculations really, really fast. If even that much. Potential understanding isn’t so huge either, because of the complexity involved in integrated circuits and processing and code.

The pattern continues with things like nuclear power, the Internet (well, I think the Internet is easier to understand than the computer, really… but maybe that’s just me), etc.

Then large language models and agentic AIs. The number of people who do understand is quite small. The number who even can understand seems pretty small, too. I only have a vague idea of how they work. And I have the vague impression that it might be beyond me to fully understand, even if I studied it with that goal.

All of that to say past accommodation of societies to new tech is not a predictor of future performance, to borrow a phrase.

We could really make a very large mess with this. Or maybe we won’t. I’m not confident one way or the other.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

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