Recorded history goes back 8,000 years or more.  In the span during which humans have written down what they were thinking, there’s been no shortage of of predictions that the world was about to end.  The earliest known prediction of doom was found on a Mesopotamian tablet dating to 2800 B.C.

Doomsday predictions are found in nearly all cultures.  The Norse had their God Ragnarok, the Greeks their Moros and Cassandra.  And end of world predictions weren’t limited to Pagans.  The Old Testament tells of Noah and the Flood.  The New Testament has the Book of Revelation.  It’s not a pretty picture.

Humans created calendars, and the calendars themselves gave rise to doomsday predictions.  Some thought the world would end when we reached 1000 A.D.  A thousand years later, humans had learned nothing from the past, and we had the Y2K hysteria, where serious people thought the computers would kill us all.

And let’s not forget the Mayan calendar prediction.  The Mayan calendar cycle ended December 12, 2012.  Some said that was the end of times.  It wasn’t.  More likely the Mayans were wiped out before they could issue the second edition.

We’ve been told so often that the world was about to end that doomsday predictions have inspired jokes.  My favorite is the sample headlines from different newspapers.  The New York Times – World to End Tomorrow – story and analysis on page B11.  The Wall Street Journal – World Ends Tomorrow, markets to close early.  USA Today – It’s Over!  The Washington Post – World Ends Tomorrow, women and minorities hardest hit.

I think the eternal obsession with predicting the end of times stems from human nature itself.  We are curious and nosy beings who don’t want to miss anything, and if the world ended, we wouldn’t.

Some doomsday predictions stemmed from ignorance.  Others were motivated by religious zeal.  However all such predictions share a common element.  By predicting imminent death, the purveyors seek to exert control over the living.  It’s been the same old story.  “Your life may suck today, but I can promise you paradise, if of course, you do exactly what I tell you to do right now.”

The point is, in order for good to triumph over evil there has to be a convenient boogeyman to scare the sheep into putting themselves in the hands of the wolves.  There has been no shortage of villains.

People predicted that industrialization would destroy jobs and cast most into poverty.  The opposite was true.  The advent of automobiles was feared as a threat to the horse trade.  Today, no one’s looking to trade his Honda in for a horse, and activists are trying to get rid of what few horses remain.

During the Cold War, we were told the Russians would end the world.  In the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, my father installed a short-lived, ridiculous bomb shelter in the basement.

When the Iron Curtain fell, the Communists realized that they required a new means of taking over the world.  Overnight, the Communist Reds turned Green, and the ideological world takeover was replaced with crippling ecological restrictions designed to accomplish the same purpose.

The Green nuts used various messages.  “Save the whales.”  Until their windmills killed the whales.  “Save the planet.” As though the only species capable of destroying all life on Earth had the ability to save it.  At the first Earth Day in 1970, “experts” predicted worldwide famine and mass extinction by the year 2000.  Wrong!  Then, “Global warming,” until it became apparent that their foundational data had been falsified.  Then it became, “Climate Change.”

And climate change is blamed for everything.  Too hot?  Climate change.  Too cold?  Climate change.  Had a hurricane?  Climate change.  This year, so far, no named hurricanes have appeared.  What’s to blame?  Climate change.  They also blame El Nino, which for my money is, El Bullshit.

Each new predicted apocalypse employs the same time honored prescription.  “Submit to our demands.  It’s for your own good.  And if you refuse, good luck.  The world will come to an end.”  Bernie Sanders and AOC promised us 6 years ago that the world would end in 6 years.  Obviously, they’re not singing the same song now.

The Covid pandemic was yet another opportunity for the Left to control the populace.  Stand six feet apart or you’ll die.  Wear a mask or you’ll die.  Take these vaccines or you’ll die.  We now know they made all of it up, just so they could dictate people’s lives.

The latest doomsday craze is over Artificial Intelligence.  It will destroy jobs, they warn.  It will replace human beings with robots, they warn.  And, scariest of all, AI will become a monster that destroys the entire world.  Lately, Democrats have begun to preach against AI and data centers.  It’s just a magician’s trick  Misdirection.

They preach affordability, despite the fact that their own policies created the affordability problem.  They still want to defund the police, erase the borders, spend us into bankruptcy, and elect quasi-terrorist radicals, but those issues won’t sell, so it’s now “AI will bring about the end of the world.”  Sound familiar?

There even are supposedly responsible people from the AI industry who are preaching doom, and begging for government regulation, a/k/a/ government protection.  What they really want is protection from lawsuits and antitrust claims, in other words, a monopoly.

Picture that.  An all powerful monopoly controlling access to all the information ever amassed in world history.  An informational conglomerate, immune from lawsuits or the antitrust laws, and free to peddle to the unsuspecting recipients of their services any shit they desire to peddle, which then must be accepted as “the truth.”  What possibly could go wrong?

We don’t have to wonder about that, because we lived it in 2020 and beyond.  The social media tycoons banded together, with the aid of the FBI and other governmental miscreants to silence a sitting president in the run up to an election, banning him from communicating with his own constituents.  They tried to impose speech codes, arbitrarily deciding what was “misinformation.”

Personal liberty ends when the government gets to decide what’s true or false.  Would be leftist dictators understand this.  They don’t want to do away with AI, they want it to do their bidding.  And so, once again it’s doom and gloom.  “The end of the world is nigh.”

One reasonable voice spoke out against this latest doomsday prediction.  “If you are designing AI systems that you truly fear will destroy the world, just stop.”  No.  The robots are not about to take over the world, or to destroy it.

Leave those stories for Hollywood to tell.  Once set in motion, how can Man ever stop these insidious machines from killing us all?  I have the perfect solution.  Base the AI machinery in Cuba.  This way, if things get out of hand, all we need to do is wait for the next island-wide power failure.  Then, we just pull the plug.