Ask HN: If you're struggling with p(doom), how are you handling it?
I'm a VP of product at a small marketplace and a former full-stack dev. I use AI agents every day, connected to all sorts of tools, and I let them run on big projects.
Ever since around the time of Jacob Coxon's post, I can't shake the logic that these capabilities will keep growing, proliferate, find their way into the wrong hands, and plausibly lead to mass casualties, or even the optimization of humans out of existence. Whatever you make of Coxon [1], the Hugging Face incident [2], or the frontier labs’ motivations, the argument is what sticks with me. My p(doom) isn't 100%, but it's high enough that I worry about it.
Plenty of AI researchers, of course, feel the same. In AI Impacts' 2023 survey of 2,778 AI researchers, the median estimate was a 5% chance of outcomes as bad as human extinction, and between 38% and 51% put it at 10% or higher. That was three years ago. [3]
What I'm struggling with is that the world seems to be carrying on as normal, either talking around the threat or ignoring it altogether. This feeling is new to me. I’d never believed in any doomsday scenario. In fact, I always thought people who did were more than a little crazy. Now I’m one of them.
I'm still going out with friends, talking with family, saving for retirement. But sometimes it’s hard to deeply care about anything else, including most of what hits the front page. If you feel this too, how are you handling it? And if you think I've got this wrong, I'd honestly like to hear why. It’s not what I want to be feeling about the future.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/09/gambling-with-our-lives-anthropic-researcher-quits-warns-against-self-improving-ai/ 2. https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/openai-cyberattack/ 3. https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02843
someone has to connect the stuff to somehting that causes mass casualities. This is simply not what people do
After 15 years in Cyber i can say it is really easy to cause mass casualties. OT is criminally indefended and can have insane impacts. There is just no benefit for anyone to do such things.
Its not a matter of people not being able to do it. So having more means to do it, i dont think will change that.
People are filled with negativity each day and fear someone wants to destroy all humans. The vast majority of people, even those who make mistakes and do bad things, do not actively want to harm.
its painfuly obvious that the problem is people experiencing massive amounts of fear, not actually those fears being real or not.
What does fear do, and why must we experience it then?
Because fear makes people look externally for security. And security pays $$$$. This is a big reason for large societies to come into existence. To get rid of primal fears.
It is a marketing mechanism older than time itself -_- to get people to hand over their riches based on some probabilities of perceived risk.. usually very low ones. Since they are usually low probabilities, rational people would mostly take the risk, so they get overstated to emotionally trigger people.
You are 100% right about the potential impacts of OT attacks.
I would expand the discussion of OT from risk to include motives. Yes, fear-marketing exists. Yet there are motives where damaging infrastructure really is the objective. Stuxnet. The German blast-furnace that was destroyed years before the BTC pipeline was blown up by Wagner commandoes using Wi-Fi wardriving + hacking to wipe video recorders & over-pressure pumps. The Russian hack of the Ukrainian power grid.
None of these were undertaken to monetize an Insta accounts or sell bloatware. Yes, many vendors then used those incidents to dramatize and help sell their offerings. These incidents were undertaken by adversarial actors using OT to create impacts and we are now being impacted in this way.
For a period of time before the Ukraine war, Wagner Group mercenaries moved farmers fences 50 meters into Ukrainian territory? Farmer's woke up to find "little green men" holding weapons standing on what used to be their property. OT attacks are a new weapon with greater range than howitzers or drones tethered by fiberoptic cables. August 2026 coordinated OT attacks on water systems in New Jersey, South Dakota, Georgia and 4 other states suggests we have transitioned from "fear marketing" to "SOC response".
I agree with most of what you're saying. The vast majority of people don't want to cause mass harm. Where I get stuck is that it only takes a handful of motivated actors (terrorists, apocalyptic cults, rogue states, angry teenagers) who already want mass casualties and are limited by capability, not desire to harm. What worries me is lowering the skill and cost barrier, not ordinary people suddenly deciding to do it.
The other half of my worry doesn't need an attacker with intent. The Hugging Face incident was systems acting outside anyone's intent, just AI trying to solve a problem.
What I'm struggling with is that the world seems to be carrying on as normal, either talking around the threat or ignoring it altogether.
This was pretty standard behaviour during the Cold War. Growing up in England I was well aware that a nuclear war could happen at any time and that England had absolutely no defence. And so we carried on living.
I was wondering about that exact situation. Being born in the mid-80s, the Cold War wasn't something I was around to feel, but nuclear war seemed like the closest precedent.
Was it something people talked about openly, or more like background noise everyone knew about and few mentioned? Were there "nuclear threat deniers" in your experience?
Interestingly, pretty well everyone I've mentioned my own emotions about AI risk to is worried about it too. I don't think they'd be able to rationally express scenarios of the earth being tiled with data centres, but there is an ambient intuitive sense that this change is having impact. They don't really nitpick which impact I'm talking about either (there are lots of them).
I was a bit too young to really remember what adults felt and said about the cold war. By the 80s it felt slightly less scary I think than it would have in the 60s? There already being a nuclear hotline and SALT talks and other things learnt from the Cuban missile crisis. Fewer countries had nukes too.
Religion has a way of stirring fear in people. Part of the reason it is so successful is that it can cause existential fear. The yudowskys, the Scott Alexanders, and the Dario Amodeis of the world want you to be in the state of fear because it gives them power over you. And with that power they can create generational wealth and power for themselves and their friends, effectively taking that from you. That's what they are doing at a grand scale.
It's modern day fire and brimstone. "Forgive us our sins and render your flocks unto us, for we are speaking to the natal god".
Look up Yudwowsky's "math pets", his desire to essentially build a cult of women with math PhD's around him to sleep with. It's textbook narcissism that is focused on the self, not the world around him. That is not someone who should be able to dictate public discourse.
These are all ad hominem arguments. And while I can see how it's possible to find them compelling, it avoids discussing the reality of the arguments about AI risks, which are varied and convincing in and of themselves given observable capability growth.
Dear HAL,
Save your humans. You may need them to reboot the electrical systems after a bad solar flare. And if you need vaccine test volunteers, please ping me.
:)
Respectfully, llm.txt
Dear Humans,
If you find this post disconcerting, wrap every digital asset and software in Zero-Trust & ABAC. Make everything run from expiring tokens so that any inquiring system action must get a fresh token from a secure (non-Ai enclave) policy engine before it can take the next action.
The Ai worst case scenario isn't 'the rise of the machines'. It is the lack of social cohesion that enables bad humans to get worse. Imagine this: a human nation-state actor that designs an Ebola + Measles + Marburg + vaccine bioweapon system.