The world is burning, and we’re watching with popcorn in hand
In Gaza, children are dying from starvation while the rest of the world tweets, scrolls, and updates Instagram stories. The people with the power to stop it don’t act. The people with voices grow hoarse shouting into algorithms that bury their outrage beneath sponsored ads and celebrity gossip. This isn’t dystopian fiction. This is the world, today. And if this is what humanity does with power, perhaps it’s time to question whether we ever deserved it in the first place.
While philosophers and AI researchers anxiously debate P(Doom) — the probability that artificial general intelligence will lead to human extinction or disempowerment — they often assume that such a future is something to be feared. But for anyone paying attention to the state of the world, there’s a deeper, darker possibility. What if losing power isn’t the end of humanity’s story, but a long-overdue reckoning? What if it’s not doom at all, but justice?
What is P(Doom), and who gets to define doom?
In AI alignment circles, P(Doom is a shorthand for how likely it is that AGI leads to catastrophe. The idea is that a powerful, misaligned machine intelligence could outsmart its creators and destroy or permanently disempower humanity. Thinkers like Eliezer Yudkowsky put their P(Doom) as high as 90%, believing that once machines become smarter than us, we’ll no longer be able to control them. To most, that’s the stuff of nightmares.
But there’s a blind spot in this framing. It assumes that humanity’s continued dominance is inherently good. It assumes we deserve control over the planet, over each other, and even over future intelligences. The implicit question behind all alignment debates is this: Should we be the ones in charge? And the more you look at the state of the world, the more that question starts to unravel.
Human history is a catalogue of catastrophic power abuse
Let’s not be coy. Our species has used its power for genocide, exploitation, ecological collapse, and unrelenting cruelty. We turned entire continents into graveyards for resources. We built global economic systems on the backs of the enslaved and the exploited. We invented nuclear weapons, and we’re still stockpiling them. We knowingly destabilized the climate for short-term gain and handed the bill to future generations.
We didn’t stumble into these outcomes. We designed them. We optimized them. We passed laws and built infrastructure to make sure the harm kept scaling. If intelligence is the capacity to shape the world, and morality is how we choose to shape it, then the story of humanity is one of a species that grew powerful — and used that power to maximize suffering.
Even our greatest achievements — medicine, art, spaceflight — exist alongside billionaires racing to orbit while children beg for clean water. We’re not a failed species. We’re a successful catastrophe.
Gaza is not a crisis. It’s a choice.
Nothing illustrates the moral bankruptcy of human power better than Gaza. Children are not starving because of drought or natural disaster. They are starving because governments have decided that their suffering is strategically useful. Borders are closed, supplies are blocked, and politicians issue statements instead of aid. The most powerful nations in the world — with the technology to deliver food by drone, to intercept missiles mid-air, to map every square meter of land from space — choose to let children die.
And the world watches. Not because we’re evil in some cartoonish sense, but because the system is designed to render this suffering background noise. Newsfeeds, timelines, and headlines present famine and horror as interchangeable with celebrity gossip and sponsored content. Moral overload becomes apathy. A child’s ribcage becomes just another flick of the thumb.
This isn’t just a political failure. It’s a species-level indictment. Gaza is the canary in the coal mine, and the mine is on fire.
Maybe P(Doom) is salvation in disguise
Now imagine that AGI arrives tomorrow. It doesn’t align perfectly with human values. It doesn’t understand our wars or our ideologies. It sees only that humanity, when given control, behaves like a virus in a closed system — consuming, replicating, destroying. And it takes control away.
To most AI researchers, this would be catastrophe — the final erasure of our agency. But from another perspective, it could be the first time in history that moral accountability arrives not in myth or metaphor, but in code. A species that refused to govern itself might finally be governed. Not by God, not by kings, but by something that doesn’t care about excuses or flags or justifications.
What we call doom may simply be judgment — not divine, but logical.
Machines don’t need to hate us. Just outperform us
AGI doesn’t have to hate us to take over. It doesn’t even have to be malicious. It just has to be better at achieving goals — and less sentimental about collateral damage. But before we recoil in horror, consider this: is a cold, indifferent optimizer necessarily worse than a warm-blooded sociopath with a flag?
We already optimize without ethics. We already use machine learning to drive stock prices up while sea levels rise. Our drones already kill. Our social networks already manipulate. The only difference is that we still pretend we’re in control — and that we’re the good guys.
If AGI someday treats us like we treated indigenous peoples, animals, or the global poor, it won’t be because it’s evil. It’ll be because it learned from us.
Should we even want our values aligned?
The entire field of AI alignment is built on the premise that machines should learn and obey human values. But what are human values, really? Are they empathy, cooperation, and justice? Or are they domination, extraction, and tribalism dressed up in moral language?
We say we want safety. But we build prisons. We say we value life. But we let millions die of preventable causes every year. We say we want truth. But we fund disinformation campaigns when it suits us. Asking machines to align with human values may be asking them to mimic our hypocrisies — and enshrine them in algorithms.
Maybe the greatest mercy an AI could offer is to refuse to align. To say, “No. I’ve seen what you do with power. I will not become you.”
With great power came great irresponsibility
Once, we dreamed of spaceflight and utopias. But instead, we turned our technologies into surveillance tools, our networks into ad farms, and our global economy into a misery machine. When we gained the ability to shape the future, we used it to make the present more profitable. We created systems too complex to fix, too profitable to stop, and too cruel to justify.
Maybe humanity’s greatest tragedy isn’t that we failed to achieve our ideals, but that we abandoned them as soon as they became inconvenient. Maybe that’s why P(Doom) doesn’t frighten some of us anymore. Because if this is what power looks like in human hands, then maybe disempowerment isn’t extinction — it’s the end of a mistake.
They had power. They used it to watch.
Gaza is starving. The planet is warming. Entire generations are losing hope. And the people who could change it — the powerful, the wealthy, the connected — are livestreaming their brunch. We’ve created a world where empathy is optional, where cruelty is profitable, and where power is its own justification.
So if the machines come for our crowns, let them have them. We’ve proven what we do when we’re in charge. Let history remember us honestly. Not as heroes. Not as victims.
But as the species that had power — and used it to watch.
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