What if the machines don't end us?

How resisting the forces seeking to control AI opens futures beyond the apocalyptic.

Dec 02, 2025

A recent piece in The Guardian explored popular culture depictions of how AI might “end us all”. This is an increasingly common framing - AI as a mathematical horseman of the apocalypse - it’s a technology that’s accelerating so quickly, and consuming so much energy, that the inevitable consequence is either ecological collapse or a social unraveling. It’s an argument that’s not without merit. But The Guardian’s piece, light-hearted though it was, provoked me into thinking of a different kind of question.

What if AI doesn’t end us?
What if AI forces forms of progress that we’ve avoided for decades?

I’m not taking an optimistic viewpoint for the sake of it. The real risks exist - this isn’t a rebuttal so much as an attempt to widen the possibility space. It’s always easy to catastrophize, but that shouldn’t automatically be the last word.

I considered a counterfactual to the doom narrative. Learning from technology’s always-messy history, how the same systems we fear might also be the ones that drive us forward.

1. The energy reckoning

For all the imaginative stories about AI itself choosing to destroy us, the primary anxiety right now is AI’s energy consumption.

Researchers have been warning us for months and years - today’s AI models require extraordinary power, and the demand is accelerating quickly. If you project our current models of usage forward, it becomes ecologically (and practically) unsustainable.

But linear projections like that are often wrong. Especially you extrapolate from a fairly short period of technological inflection.

Existential pressure can change the shape of innovation.

The ozone crisis saw one of the fastest global regulatory responses ever enacted.
Post-war industrialization has driven chemical standards and safety legislation.
Energy shocks have resulted in efficiency mandates and new research.

It’s likely that AI will become the first digital environmental emergency. But it might also be a force large enough to make us do what slow climate collapse, and political and economic inertia, hasn’t yet managed.

AI can be a catalyst to truly accelerate clean energy.

That’s not because all the tech companies are suddenly going to become benevolent environmental stewards. It’s just that they might not survive without solving the problem.

Pressure drives adaptation. AI will strain our energy resources, but it could also be the first technology that forces us to build the new resources that we actually need.

2. The return of the open web?

The early promise of the internet has been commoditized - monopolies, proprietary infrastructure - have turned the world wide web into corporate fiefdoms. And AI centralization has the potential to further accelerate that trend.

But trajectories don’t have to move in a straight line, and there’s another - more hopeful - potential scenario.

AI accidentally re-opens the web.

There are two converging dynamics which I think might make this possible.

AI will build more AI

We’re seeing model architectures, training loops, better distillation techniques, optimization routines all already being automated. And this could mean:

The proliferation of smaller, powerful models
Community access to remixed, specialized systems
A plummeting barrier to entry

That wouldn’t be a metaverse of corporate-owned silos. That would be a Cambrian-like explosion of new tools.

Centralization is fragile

We already see the following in the AI sphere:

Models leaking
Diffusion of capabilities
Proprietary advances mirrored almost instantly by other networks

At which point, it can start to become difficult for any one entity, or small group of entities, to contain the ecosystem.

There are parallels here to the ethos of the early web. It’s messy, anarchic, generative, remixed, and with an exploding number of stakeholders.

Dystopia doesn’t have to be the only direction of travel. The web might have closed off, become “owned”, but that wasn’t inevitable. And the same pressures for platform lock-in also create pressure for the alternative - profound openness.

Removing the barriers to creativity

The cultural panic around AI centers on creativity - what it means, who owns it, what it’s worth.

Creativity isn’t a finite resource. The limitation is access to creative tools.

Technical shifts in human expression tend to be met with existential fears. Photography kills painting. Synthesizers kill music. Streaming kills cinema. Digital kills analog.

But we see a repeating pattern - human imagination expands to account for the changes in medium. And craft changes, too. The fear of makers that their skills might be devalued is fair and real. But craft recontextualizes, it doesn’t disappear.

Can we recognize what becomes possible when the administrative tax on creativity is removed?

People who can’t draw can design
People who can’t code can build
People who can’t compose can orchestrate
People whose bodies or circumstances limited expression can now gain entirely new channels
Children can utilize their deeply creative minds with a fluency never before available

Creativity increases when the gatekeepers fall away. Craft may refocus further on taste, coherence, defining intent, and curation.

AI doesn’t eliminate artists. It eliminates the scarcity model that decided who could become one.

And - because I like a connection to folklore - might this see a return of storytelling to the commons? Mythmaking can become shared, remixed, co-authored.

The rise of augmented labor

We’re often presented with the argument that “AI will replace workers”. I think the story is more “AI changes what human work even is.”

Human value is relational.

Judgement
Taste
Cultural context
Emotional intelligence
Synthesis
Narrative awareness
Ethics
Lived experiences

That value isn’t just a nice-to-have. That value is the difference between good decisions and terrible, even destructive ones.

AI can simulate, or use pattern recognition to generate something plausible. It can’t situate that generation within a society, understand its impact. Only humans can do that.

What if the future of labor is augmentation, not automation?

Imagine a union that’s built about the governance of an AI model, not just wages
Workers negotiating for an ownership stake in the tools that amplify their own value
Redistribution of productivity downward, rather than hoarding it upward

That would be a meaningful, positive, shift. AI wouldn’t erase work, but it would change it, and maybe (albeit the forever unfulfilled promise of technology to date!) give people their time back.

The danger is who governs, not AI itself

The danger of AI isn’t that will decide to end us, one way or another.

AI will magnify the power of whoever controls it

Authoritarian states. Corporations. Rogue actors. Militaries. Billionaires.

They’re already shaping the terrain, trying to land grab and take ownership.

But it makes for a reframed debate. It’s not the technology, it’s about people, policy, access and agency.

If AI remains centralized then I fear for future collapse. But if we can manage to democratize access to AI, then the future expands instead.

There is a huge risk, and one that malign actors are already working to bring about. But risk isn’t the same as destiny.

A wider horizon

It’s weird, but apocalyptic narratives can actually be comforting - they feel inevitable, and so they relieve us of responsibility. If the machines are going to end us, then the only rational thing we can do is to run away.

But other stories deserve equal weight.

AI might help us fix what we already broke.

Restoring ecosystems
Modeling climate intervention
Augmenting scientific discovery
Personalizing medicine
Expanding new forms of craft
Expanding who gets to participate in future imagination

This is not guaranteed - not even close. It’s not automatic.

But collapse isn’t guaranteed, either.

The future is a branching corridor, and we shape our direction through decisions, governance, distribution and participation - as individuals and as groups.

If AI “ends us” then it’s because we let power continue to consolidate unchecked. Not because of the technology itself.

But if we can push back against that trend (and, make no mistake, that consolidation is the trend) then AI doesn’t have to be the end of the story. We can build cleaner energy, open infrastructure, expand creativity, and augment our labor - and begin a new story.

Robin Cannon | Stories and Signals

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