April 6, 2024

IN THE GRIP OF APOCALYPSE ANGST:

[In Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, author Dorian Lynskey] quotes so widely that at times the book resembles a megadeath miscellany. One of the perverse pleasures of reading about how humanity deals with calamity is the comically grim vocabulary, some of which was new to me: omnicide, promortalism, Weltuntergangsroman. There are a couple of handy phrases: unaligned AI (‘if AI is not aligned with human values, then it is considered “unaligned” or “unfriendly”’) and its potential consequence, knowledge-enabled mass destruction. How have I come this far without considering the distinction between catastrophic risk and existential risk? Hint: the latter is worse.

Or is it? Bellow is the first novelist Lynskey quotes on the subject of our perverse love of apocalypse but he’s not the last. Here’s a Don DeLillo character arguing that the news has displaced the novel:

This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don’t need the novel… We don’t even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings.

And here’s Kurt Vonnegut: ‘Let us be perfectly frank for a change. For practically everybody, the end of the world can’t come soon enough.’ Made-up stories about total annihilation are thrilling, and yet we can’t seem to engage with the reality of an encroaching doom.

In her 1965 essay on sci-fi films ‘The Imagination of Disaster’ (a touchstone for Lynskey), Susan Sontag argues that part of our viewing pleasure ‘comes from the sense in which these movies are in complicity with the abhorrent’. She writes about the ‘peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, making a mess’, but at the same time acknowledges the enduring effect of the Bomb. In the middle of the 20th century it became clear that from then to the end of human history, every person would spend his individual life not only under the threat of individual death, which is certain, but of something almost unsupportable psychologically – collective incineration and extinction, which could come at any time, virtually without warning. It was Sontag who pointed out that the title ‘Apocalypse Now’ was wishful thinking. What we’re living with is ‘Apocalypse From Now On’.

As James Piereson wrote in Camelot and Cultural Revolution, the death of JFK, combined with the myriad failures of the Great Society, caused once optimistic Democrats to become what he dubbed “punitive liberals” by the mid-1960s. Richard Nixon winning the presidency in 1968 seemed to push them completely over the edge, resulting in a massive number of competing doomsday scenarios by the early years of the following decade. (Which not surprisingly, quickly became fodder for Hollywood’s post 2001, pre-Star Wars eco-obsessed sci-fi movies). Or to paraphrase the late and sadly missed Kathy Shaidle on Trump as Hitler, I’m already on (at least) my fourth apocalypse:

Oh, and:

Lynskey quotes so widely that at times the book resembles a megadeath miscellany. One of the perverse pleasures of reading about how humanity deals with calamity is the comically grim vocabulary, some of which was new to me: omnicide, promortalism, Weltuntergangsroman. There are a couple of handy phrases: unaligned AI (‘if AI is not aligned with human values, then it is considered “unaligned” or “unfriendly”’) and its potential consequence, knowledge-enabled mass destruction.

I got your unaligned AI right here!

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll