The 9/11 generation may be building AI’s 9/11 moment

Born in 1979, the year Julian Assange called “Year Zero,” I am an Xennial, a member of that most exclusive of microgenerations.These days, it's fashionable to see yourself — or your troubles — as too unique or complex for anyone else to really understand, perhaps in reaction to how digital life seems to reduce everyone to the same kind of matter: interchangeable and insignificant.‘Some people confess guilt to claim credit for the sin.’But for an Xennial, it is surely a fair reaction to actual circumstances. Pure Gen Xers are trapped in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Pure Millennials are stuck in the ’00s and early ’10s. Xennials came of age in the late ’90s, a dark, captivating, dangerous, mysterious, seductive, shimmering, incalculable, and irreducible moment that quietly began sometime in 1996 and ended, with a bang, on September 11, 2001.Xennials slammed into this moment as teens who had already gotten a front-row seat to the cosmic unfolding of a shadow world with no clear name, a world that transformed rubes, naifs, thrift-store hippies, emo suburbanites, grunge enthusiasts, and bumbling nerds into dark elves, goth gfs, enfants terribles, rock stars, cyberpunks, supermodels, posthumans, celebrities, millionaires, assassins, spies, sex objects, and, yes, even terrorists.In the blink of an eye, the world of Rusted Root, Pearl Jam, Barenaked Ladies, “Dazed and Confused,” corduroy pants, “Legends of the Fall,” hacky sacks, kegs, and road trips became the world of Aphex Twin, Massive Attack, “The X-Files,” Smashing Pumpkins’ “Adore,” “Fight Club,” “The Matrix,” black leather everything, “Glamorama,” martinis, “The Anarchist’s Cookbook,” “Faces of Death,” chilled vodka shots, VIP booths, and jet-setting.For many, all too many years, I have written here and there about all this. Regular readers will know I actually wrote a whole book about it — “I Know This Sounds Crazy.” I bring it up again only to establish, for the uninitiated, some proof that the Xennial perspective on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 is uniquely important in what and how it perceives.So it gives me a real out-of-body, quintessentially Xennial feeling to observe — and, it seems, to be the first to observe — that this week, the 9/11 generation is the one that might just 9/11 the world.Hyperbole?Not according to the AI insiders now warning that the systems they are building could become uncontrollable.RELATED: Now they’re saying the AIs built ‘secret civilizations’ — the truth is far worse Ole_CNX/Getty ImagesAnthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned this week after working at both OpenAI and Anthropic, accusing the companies of “gambling with our lives” in a race toward self-improving superintelligence. Coxon said people building these systems sincerely believe they could kill everyone by the end of the decade. Another Anthropic researcher, Evan Hubinger, publicly said his team “earnestly believe AI could kill all humans” and put the probability above 10% within the next decade.The people atop the two most prominent closed frontier labs are overwhelmingly members of the 9/11 generation: Dario Amodei, born in 1983; Daniela Amodei, 1987; Sam Altman, 1985; and Greg Brockman, 1987.And Millennials are unusually enthusiastic about the technology. McKinsey found that workers ages 35-44 reported the highest levels of AI expertise and comfort of any age group it surveyed: 62% described themselves as highly familiar with generative AI, compared with 50% of workers ages 18-24.Millennials are also the largest generation since the Boomers, a record that seems increasingly difficult to beat as birth rates around the world crater.But something more than quantity is at work in the eerie double bind consciously imposed on the world by Millennials: incredibly overclocked anxiety and incredibly overclocked idealism.It is a shame that so few saw it coming, but as a whole it can now be said without a shadow of doubt that Millennials are ... Millenarians.As Wikipedia — the Millennial Encyclopedia — explains, millenarianism is the belief in a coming fundamental transformation of society after which “all things will be changed.” Millenarian movements expect radical transformation, often through or after catastrophe.I haven’t asked around, but I'm pretty sure not many Xennials, in either absolute or relative numbers, are millenarians — certainly not of the Millennial variety. As far as I can tell, and as far as I would describe myself, Xennials simply don’t move, think, feel, dream, or overwhelm themselves like that.The stunning tendency of millenarian Millennials to crash out through excessively recursive self-reflection is particular. And for Xennials — ahem — with an interest in the intersection of technology and theology, that tendency is strikingly analogous to the breakdown of the cybernetic control systems Millennials are driving and fearing as they lead on AI.RELATED: Mark Zuckerberg wants AI to save America from itself Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Inc./Getty ImagesIt is sobering indeed to stare into this abyss of their own creation — one utterly bereft of the glamour, seductiveness, mystique, and dark authority of the abyss the Xennials bore secret witness to as it conspicuously consumed their cultural, artistic, and spiritual worlds.The difference may be that this abyss actually works.Anthropic itself has warned that AI may soon be capable of accelerating its own development with declining human involvement. Coxon’s resignation came amid growing concern about recursive self-improvement — systems helping to create more capable systems, which then accelerate the next generation in turn.And so these curious, unfortunate creatures go on cursing and praising themselves in equal measure, with their over-the-top comparisons of themselves to Robert Oppenheimer.That brings to the Xennial mind nothing so much as the clapback Oppenheimer supposedly received from his brilliant Manhattan Project colleague John von Neumann: “Some people confess guilt to claim credit for the sin.”For a generation relentlessly taught to celebrate itself and be part of something bigger, the prize for sharing in the blame for blowing up the world may be irresistible: The ultimate — and final — participation trophy.