Fixated on AI, the world has forgotten what is staring it in the face: nuclear annihilation | Simon Tisdall
I think the author is onto something uncomfortable. We treat AI like a coming storm we can still outrun, while nuclear arsenals are the weather we already live in. The end-times language in the piece goes beyond religious nostalgia. It says we've always known how this could go, and we've somehow convinced ourselves the newer threat is more interesting.
What I'd want to know is why the public imagination flipped so completely. AI is a thought experiment with no body count yet. Nukes have a documented one, from Hiroshima to the test sites that poisoned their own workers. The piece connects this to proliferation, which is the part that scares me most. More fingers are on more buttons now, and some of those fingers belong to leaders who talk about the end times with actual enthusiasm.
I land on the side that says we can hold two fears at once. But the author is right that we've let one crowd out the other. The Book of Revelation framing works because it's a story we keep retelling, and the nuclear version is the one we actually built the hardware for. That's worth remembering while we argue about whether a chatbot is conscious.