AI may “kill all humans,” industry leaders say. So why won’t they stop building it?

Yeah.

And I think an important point that you make throughout is that you know, many of the same personalities, political parties, forces sort of now embracing this kind of outlook, this tendency are the same folks who kind of sewed the conditions for doing this by, you know, breaking down, you know, breaking down social contracts, like knocking away, you know, government, organizations villainizing outgroups and stirring a lot of the resentment that they are now capitalizing on.

Before we drill deeper into the AI part and the tech part, love the focus on today.

I also wanted to ask you, you have this great coinage, the Armageddon Industrial Complex, later riffing on the Umberto Eco.

And that's, I think, a key part of this too, because you're talking about all the influencers and the think tanks and the groups that sort of promulgate this sort of tendency.

Can you speak a little bit about how that works i know naomi you have some experience with that writing your last book doppelganger and having a you know both feet in these worlds for for a while

yeah and i think i mean to be honest i think that this builds more on earlier work um and and that phrase armageddon industrial complex um it comes out of it does out of a desire to untangle and define what is different about this economy from what in the past I've called the disaster capitalism complex, right? And the fact that profiteering from huge crises and pain and suffering is not new.

What I was tracking when I wrote The Shock Doctor, which came out almost 20 years ago now, was the way in which a whole infrastructure rose up after September 11th.

I mean, we were speaking on the eve of 25 years after 9-11.

But that was an economic boom as well as a huge disaster, a huge tragedy.

And some of the major players that we're following now, like Peter Thiel and Palantir, grew out of the tech security boom after 9-11 and the dream of total surveillance, right? The main difference that we're seeing now is that in that period, in the shock doctrine for people who might not be familiar with it, it's really a history of neoliberalism told through shocks, right? So it looks at these kind of moments of like punctuated disaster, like a huge economic crisis, a military coup, a war, and how that kind of opens up a period of brief disorientation where you can ram through the whole neoliberal program, privatization, deregulation, you know, tax cuts for the rich, whatever.

Right.

So it looks at Chile.

It looks, you know, it looks at Thatcher's England and so on.

The big difference that we're seeing now and why we're calling it the Armageddon industrial complex is that the shocks don't stop, right? The shocks are not the exception.

They're the rule, right? And it's really about an economy that is taking rolling crisis, rolling disasters for granted and figuring out how to both survive and profit from it.

in a way that makes one very blasé about also accelerating it, right? Astra has a great line about how they don't just, they're not just building the arc, they're also causing the flood.

So that's sort of, you know, nothing comes out of nowhere.

All of this is, you know, you've got a picture of a road behind you, it's like You continue down that road and eventually you arrive at where you were going.

You know, I often felt when I was writing The Shock Doctrine that I would, you know, catch a glimpse of the future in these moments of shock.

Right.

Like, you know, Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the kind of like the green zone, red zone of Baghdad.

Right.

It's like the rich are able to get private security behind their fortress walls.

And it was like, is this the future that's being built? Kind of feels like it.