Haven’t we seen this before? The AI apocalypse has a century of reruns

Mid-September brought the convergence of three big issues for investors: oil prices over $100/barrel (keeping headline inflation sticky), surging bond yields (with the 10-year Treasury over 5%), and sudden apocalyptic warnings that unbridled AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade.” The threat of a resulting AI slowdown sent semiconductor stocks into freefall while software stocks — the feared losers in the AI takeover — surged.But to me, this sudden AI panic seems like just the latest in a long history of genuine risks being extrapolated into imminent existential catastrophes. Just looking back over the past century, examples are legion:Red Scare (1940s-50s): Legitimate concerns about Soviet espionage escalated into McCarthyism, blacklists, and widespread paranoia about communist infiltration. Malthusian Overpopulation Scare (1960s-70s): Predictions of mass famine as population overwhelmed food production were instead met by technological advances and surging agricultural productivity.Peak Oil (1970s and 1990s-2000s): Predictions that dwindling oil supplies would bring soaring prices, resource wars, and industrial collapse were upended by deepwater drilling, fracking, and other technological advances.Nuclear Power Scare (1970s-80s): Fears over accidents, waste, and proliferation helped bring reactor construction to a virtual halt. Today, nuclear is enjoying a renaissance as reliable, carbon-free baseload power.Y2K: A legacy computer-date storage issue spawned predictions of financial failures, blackouts, and planes falling from the sky, leading to extensive capital upgrades and remediation. But the apocalyptic scenarios proved greatly overstated.Post-9/11 War on Terror: A genuine terrorist threat helped fast-track the Patriot Act’s surveillance powers, TSA security apparatus, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.Climate Catastrophism: Legitimate concerns about greenhouse gases expanded into predictions of imminent tipping points, mass extinction, societal collapse, and even the end of human civilization.COVID-19: A genuinely deadly pandemic produced extraordinary lockdowns, school and business closures, travel restrictions, and vaccine mandates, demonstrating how readily emergencies can justify restrictions on ordinary liberties.I could go on. But you get the drift. My point is not that society should be indifferent to real concerns, but that framing every warning as an imminent existential threat — often backed by “scientific” timelines — creates a fearmongering frenzy among media, activists, and politicians that leads to overreaction and overregulation. The unintended consequences can do more harm than good, including convincing the public to trade personal liberty, economic freedom, and privacy for the promise of security.Of course, this latest instance of doomerism has gained broad attention because the voices speaking out include leaders of companies developing the world’s most powerful AI models: Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Sam Altman (OpenAI), and Elon Musk (xAI). After Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and made the aforementioned “kill us all” alert, Amodei published a lengthy essay calling for slower frontier development and safeguards against threats ranging from biological weapons and cyberattacks to mass job displacement and authoritarian control.Predictably, politicians jumped into the mix. The bipartisan AI Kill Switch Act would require major developers to maintain the ability to throttle or shut down dangerous AI systems, while some lawmakers are pushing for a congressional select committee on AI. Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego compared the warnings from tech CEOs to “Dr. Frankenstein telling us, ‘The monster is loose. Help me stop the monster.’”But the pushback has been equally strong. Critics argue that unilateral Western restraint would cede technological, economic, and military leadership to China, which has no reason to pause. Moreover, AI labs don’t need government permission to slow down — they can delay new models or multibillion-dollar compute clusters whenever they choose.AI PANIC IS THE NEW CLIMATE HYSTERIA — AND IT’S HANDING THE FUTURE TO CHINAAnd therein lies an obvious contradiction. The same companies warning that increasingly powerful AI might threaten civilization continue spending aggressively to build it. Skeptics see the potential for regulatory capture: The warnings inflate the perceived “god-like” power of their products while encouraging regulations that dominant incumbents are uniquely equipped to navigate. Critics like entrepreneur/investor David Sacks warn this could effectively “pull up the ladder” on open-source competitors and smaller startups.Regardless, I believe AI implementation will continue at a breakneck pace, driving an insatiable thirst for compute, unabated demand for semiconductors, memory, and storage, and a massive datacenter buildout reshaping infrastructure for electrical power, grid transformers, advanced cooling, and high-speed optical networking.Scott Martindale is CEO of Sabrient Systems LLC, an independent equity research firm and RIA.